FlyBase Funding

VFB works closely with the FlyBase team and depends on their work for many of its features. FlyBase’s funding position changed in March 2026, and not entirely for the better.

NHGRI funding has been restored for the US-based FlyBase teams. The foreign subaward that supported the curation team at the University of Cambridge has not been restored, and remains terminated. In FlyBase’s own words:

The NHGRI funding for FlyBase has been restored for US-based FlyBase teams but the foreign subaward that supported the essential curation team at the University of Cambridge UK has been terminated. Therefore, the Cambridge UK team now requests annual contributions from fly labs to support curation of new data into FlyBase and the Alliance of Genome Resources. Without these annual contributions, FlyBase will become frozen in its current state and become progressively less useful.

How to contribute

The two-route arrangement described in our earlier post — a European crowdfunding page and a US fee system still to be set up — has been replaced by a single annual contribution, open to labs anywhere. The suggested amount is £/€200 or $250 per fly researcher per year.

By card, through the University of Cambridge online store, which needs no invoice: annual contribution to fund biocuration at the FlyBase knowledgebase. Payments are accepted in GBP, Euro and USD.
By purchase order, if your institution requires an invoice: email flybase-finance@pdn.cam.ac.uk.

Current details are on the Contribute to FlyBase wiki page.

Why it matters to VFB

Curation is the part at risk, and curation is what VFB consumes. FlyBase supplies the gene, allele, transgene and stock records behind VFB’s driver-line and reagent queries, and the scRNAseq datasets VFB integrates come to us through FlyBase from the Single Cell Expression Atlas. A FlyBase frozen at its current state means new Drosophila nervous-system data stops reaching VFB by that route.

We remain grateful to Wellcome for their continued funding of Virtual Fly Brain.