Gaining Wings to FLY: Using Drosophila Oogenesis as an Entry Point for Citizen Scientists in Laboratory Research.

Citizen science is a productive approach to include non-scientists in research efforts that impact particular issues or communities. In most cases, scientists at advanced career stages design high-quality, exciting projects that enable citizen contribution, a crowdsourcing process that drives discovery forward and engages communities. The challenges of having citizens design their own research with no or limited training and providing access to laboratory tools, reagents, and supplies have limited citizen science efforts. This leaves the incredible life experiences and immersion of citizens in communities that experience health disparities out of the research equation, thus hampering efforts to address community health needs with a full picture of the challenges that must be addressed. Here, we present a robust and reproducible approach that engages participants from Grade 5 through adult in research focused on defining how diet impacts disease signaling. We leverage the powerful genetics, cell biology, and biochemistry of Drosophila oogenesis to define how nutrients impact phenotypes associated with genetic mutants that are implicated in cancer and diabetes. Participants lead the project design and execution, flipping the top-down hierarchy of the prevailing scientific culture to co-create research projects and infuse the research with cultural and community relevance.

Novel tools for genetic manipulation of follicle stem cells in the Drosophila ovary reveal an integrin-dependent transition from quiescence to proliferation.

In many tissues, the presence of stem cells is inferred by the capacity of the tissue to maintain homeostasis and undergo repair after injury. Isolation of self-renewing cells with the ability to generate the full array of cells within a given tissue strongly supports this idea, but the identification and genetic manipulation of individual stem cells within their niche remain a challenge. Here we present novel methods for marking and genetically altering epithelial follicle stem cells (FSCs) within the Drosophila ovary. Using these new tools, we define a sequential multistep process that comprises transitioning of FSCs from quiescence to proliferation. We further demonstrate that integrins are cell-autonomously required within FSCs to provide directional signals that are necessary at each step of this process. These methods may be used to define precise roles for specific genes in the sequential events that occur during FSC division after a period of quiescence.