Curation and Care: Maintaining Community Collections in Drosophila Genetics

Geneticists rely on working collections of data and of living organisms. Databases capture, order and communicate standardized genetic information, while stock centres make available vast arrays of standardized yeasts, bacteria, viruses, plasmids, cell cultures, animals and plants. Collections of both data and living organisms require dedicated professionals and practices of on-going care, curation, and funding, all of which keep such collections valuable and accessible to their biologist users. This paper deals with the collections of data and animals used by fruit fly geneticists. Since the 1920s, Drosophila researchers have depended on institutions devoted to collecting and distributing living mutant and transgenic fruit flies. From the 1930s, a newsletter (Drosophila Information Service) distributed lists of mutant stocks held in labs around the world, and from the 1940s, researchers used on book-length ‘mutant catalogues’, which systematically listed all known information about Drosophila mutants. During the 1990s, these living and text-based resources were linked through ‘FlyBase’, an online database that made available cross-referenced tables of gene mutants, bibliographies, lab addresses, and resources for obtaining mutant flies. This paper explores the practices that Drosophila database curators, editors, stock keepers and collections managers deployed to keep such living and text-based ‘community tools’ valuable and accessible. It reflects on how those professionals interpreted and negotiated the needs of diverse research ‘communities’, and argues that the practices of care and maintenance that they developed in turn shaped scientific relationships and methods.