DROSOPHILA INFORMATION NEWSLETTER Volume 17, January 1995 The Drosophila Information Newsletter has been established with the hope of providing a timely forum for informal communication among Drosophila workers. The Newsletter will be published quarterly and distributed electronically, free of charge. We will try to strike a balance between maximizing the useful information included and keeping the format short; priority will be given to genetic and technical information. Brevity is essential. If a more lengthy communication is felt to be of value, the material should be summarized and an address made available for interested individuals to request more information. Submitted material will be edited for brevity and arranged into each issue. Research reports, lengthy items that cannot be effectively summarized, and material that requires illustration for clarity should be sent directly to Jim Thompson (THOMPSON@AARDVARK.UCS.UOKNOR.EDU) for publication in DIS. Materials appearing in the Newsletter will be reprinted in DIS. Back issues of DIN are available from FlyBase in the directory flybase/news or in News/ when accessing FlyBase with Gopher. Material appearing in the Newsletter may be cited unless specifically noted otherwise. Material for publication should be submitted by e-mail. Figures and photographs cannot be accepted at present. Send technical notes to Carl Thummel and all other material to Kathy Matthews. The e-mail format does not allow special characters to be included in the text. Both superscripts and subscripts have been enclosed in square brackets; the difference should be obvious by context. Bold face, italics, underlining, etc. cannot be retained. Please keep this in mind when preparing submissions. To maintain the original format when printing DIN, use Courier 10cpi font on a standard 8.5" x 11" page with 1" margins. Drosophila Information Newsletter is a trial effort that will only succeed if a broad segment of the community participates. If you have information that would be useful to your colleagues, please take the time to pass it along. The editors: Carl Thummel Kathy Matthews Dept. of Human Genetics Dept. of Biology Eccles Institute - Bldg. 533 Indiana University University of Utah Bloomington, IN 47405 Salt Lake City, UT 84112 812-855-5782; FAX/2577 801-581-2937; FAX/5374 MATTHEWK@INDIANA.EDU CTHUMMEL@HMBGMAIL.MED.UTAH.EDU MATTHEWK@INDIANA.BITNET *** To add your name to the Newsletter distribution list, send one of the following E-mail messages from the account at which you wish to receive DIN. Via Internet -- To: LISTSERV@IUBVM.UCS.INDIANA.EDU Subject: Message: SUB DIS-L Your real name Via Bitnet -- To: LISTSERV@IUBVM Subject: Message: SUB DIS-L Your real name LISTSERV will extract your user name and node from the E-mail header and add you to the list. Use your Internet address if you have one. You will receive confirmation by E-mail if you have successfully signed on to the list. If you are on the list and do not wish to receive DIN, or you want to remove a soon-to- be-defunct address, replace SUB in the above message with UNS. The SUB command can also be used to correct spelling errors in your real name; the new entry will simply replace the old as long as it was sent from the same USERID@NODE address. *** DIN Vol. 17 TABLE OF CONTENTS >Introduction to Drosophila Information Newsletter >How to subscribe to the Newsletter >TABLE OF CONTENTS >ANNOUNCEMENTS >Drosophila Conference dates and places >Bloomington Stock Center news >Amazonian biodiversity Institute >Demerec returns to print >REQUESTS FOR MATERIALS >Genetic materials in 51B-C >Structural data on nervous system development on WWW >Atlas of an Insect Brain >Reprints/preprints on development, genetics & evolution *** ANNOUNCEMENTS DROSOPHILA CONFERENCE The 1995 Drosophila Conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 5-9. Allan Spradling is the organizer. The 1996 meeting will be held in San Diego, California, April 27-May 1. Jim Posakony will be the organizer. BLOOMINGTON STOCK CENTER NEWS * Beginning January 1, 1995, the weekly stock request deadline will be 5:00 PM on Wednesdays. All requests that include our stock numbers and your Bloomington User Number and are in by the deadline will be shipped to you the following Monday. * The Bloomington Stock Center now has a cost-recovery program. Minimal users of the stock center are not required to contribute to the center, but all users must be registered with the center and provide their Bloomington User Number (BUN) when requesting stocks. Send e-mail to matthewk@indiana.edu for more information on this program. *** POSITIONS AVAILABLE AT INSTITUTE OF ECOLOGICAL GENETICS This is to inform you of the existence of a brand new Institute of Ecological Genetics to study Amazonian biodiversity. For further information write to: Dr. Hugo Hoenigsberg Instituto de Genetica-Ecologica y Biodiversidad Amazonica Cra.4 No.71-69 Bogota D.C.COLOMBIA. FAX: 612 7369 You can send your C.V. to our personal address above. We are considering applications to fill posts as research scientific staff members. Evolutionary biologists, geneticists, ecologists, systematist, botanists, zoologists, mathematicians and other Ph.D. individuals interested in neo-tropical biological research with at least 10 years of research experience preferably, but not exclusively, in the tropics, and about 10 published scientific papers will be considered. This new Institute will study Amazonian biodiversity. Although its main purpose is research it will by inclination help, not only to preserve the Amazonian biodiversity, but also to disseminate the gospel of international management of the most wonderful world natural reserve for which it is worth to dedicate one's life. There will also be graduate degrees to be dealt with. For academic life within the Institute, please contact the Rector of the Amazonian University as follows: Dr. Ernesto Fajardo Universidad de la Amazonia Florencia, Caqueta Colombia. FAX: (988 35) 8231 Florencia is the capital of the State of Caqueta, and Caqueta is one of the three Amazonian States of Colombia. We will be working closely with Peruvian and Brazilian scientists interested in Amazonian biodiversity. Our Central offices and research labs will be in Florencia's surroundings. *** DEMEREC'S BIOLOGY OF DROSOPHILA Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press has published a facsimile edition of Demerec's classic on BIOLOGY OF DROSOPHILA. It was first published by John Wiley and Sons in 1950. Until its appearance, no central, synthesized source of biological data on Drosophila melanogaster was available, despite the fly's importance to science for three decades. Ten years in the making, it was an immediate success and remained in print for two decades. However, original copies are now very hard to find. CONTENTS *Normal Spermatogenesis in Drosophila (K.W. Cooper) *The Early Embryology of D. melanogaster (B.P. Sonnenblick) *Histogenesis, Organogenesis, and Differentiation in the Embryo of D. melanogaster Meigen (D.F. Poulson) *The Postembryonic Development of Drosophila (D. Bodenstein) *External Morphology of the Adult (G.F. Ferris) *The Internal Anatomy and Histology of the Imago of D. melanogaster (A. Miller) *Collection and Laboratory Culture (W.P. Spencer) 632 pp., illus., indexes, ISBN 09-87969-441-6; Cloth $39 To place an order, contact Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press at cshpress@cshl.org, or phone 1-800-843-4388, or fax them at 516-349-1946. *** REQUESTS FOR MATERIALS GENETIC MATERIALS IN 51B-C Michele Crozatier, Centre de Biologie du Developpement, Batiment 4R3, 118, route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse, France. Tel: (33) 61.55.82.87, Fax: (33) 61.55.65.07, Email: seroude@cict.fr. I am looking for deficiencies, P insertions or chromosome aberrations in 51B6-C3. Thanks in advance for your help. *** CALL FOR STRUCTURAL DATA ON NERVOUS SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT Karl-Friedrich Fischbach, Institut fur Biologie III, Schanzlestr. 1, 79104 Freiburg i. Brsg., Germany. kff@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de; 0761-203-2730, Fax: 0761-203-2745. Many Drosophila labs have started or are planning to provide useful information in www. Without well organized linking knots, this information is somewhat chaotically distributed and not so easy to access. Therefore, we plan to build such a knot with regard to nervous system development, first of all for our own use, but - due to the nature of www - this should be usable by the whole Drosophila community. We shall enter in 1995 as much of our own data as possible (some copyright problems have to be solved and conflict with conventional publishing to be avoided). Our emphasis will be on the optic lobe and its larval and pupal development. These data will be crosslinked to the structural data given free by your lab. Thus a decentralised international dataweb about the development of the fly's nervous system will evolve. This undertaking differs from, but is not in conflict with, the Drosophila Brain Database just launched by Nick Strausfeld and Kim Kaiser; it will rather heavily rely on many crosslinks to this database. Entries in the Tucson-Glasgow Drosophila Brain Database will be carefully checked by an oversight group, while we shall simply list www-links under appropriate headings. In order to minimise electronic traffic on our local computer net, and in order to maximise speed for your own data retrieval, we would welcome, if you download those links to your own system. If you want to participate, E-mail your www-homepage and/or any comment to kff@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de. Our www-homepage is: http://deep-thought.biologie.uni-freiburg.de/data/kff.html *** ATLAS OF AN INSECT BRAIN Katsuo Furukubo-Tokunaga, Zoological Institute, Univ. Basel, Rheinsprung 9, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland. E-mail: tokunagak@ubaclu.unibas.ch. Looking for one or two copies of the brain anatomy book ATLAS OF AN INSECT BRAIN (N.J. Strausfeld, Springer-Verlag) for educational purpose. If you have this book only to fill your book shelf, please contact me before you start to think about cleaning up the space. Thank you. *** REPRINTS/PREPRINTS ON DEVELOPMENT, GENETICS & EVOLUTION Richard Gordon, Department of Radiology, University of Manitoba, ON104, Health Sciences Centre, 820 Sherbrook Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3A 1R9. E-mail: gordonr@cc.umanitoba.ca, Fax: (204) 783-8565. I am finishing a book about the intersection of three major fields of biology: Gordon, R. (1995). The Hierarchical Genome and Differentiation Waves: Novel Unification of Development, Genetics, and Evolution (Singapore: World Scientific), in prep. If your work might be relevant to this review, I would appreciate reprints or preprints (mailed to the address above) as soon as possible, or an update, if I've been in contact with you previously. Thanks for your help. Please be sure to send your e-mail address, in case I have any questions. If you are curious, condensed accounts are given in: Gordon, R. & G.W. Brodland (1987). Cell Biophysics 11, 177-238. Gordon, R. (1993). In: Beysens, D., N. Boccara & G. Forgacs, eds. Dynamical Phenomena at Interfaces, Surfaces and Membranes. Commack, N.Y.: NOVA Science Publishers, 99-111. Gordon, R., N. K. Bjorklund & P. D. Nieuwkoop (1994). Int. Rev. Cytol. 150, 373-420. Bjorklund, N. K. & R. Gordon (1994). Computers & Chemistry 18(3), 333-345. ***