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The death and clearance of nurse cells is a consequential milestone in Drosophila melanogaster oogenesis. In preparation for oviposition, the germline-derived nurse cells bequeath to the developing oocyte all their cytoplasmic contents and undergo programmed cell death. The death of the nurse cells is controlled non-autonomously and is precipitated by epithelial follicle cells of somatic origin acquiring a squamous morphology and acidifying the nurse cells externally. Alternatively, stressors such as starvation can induce the death of nurse cells earlier in mid-oogenesis, manifesting apoptosis signatures, followed by their engulfment by epithelial follicle cells. To identify and contrast the molecular pathways underlying these morphologically and genetically distinct cell death paradigms, both mediated by follicle cells, we compared their genome-wide transcriptional, translational, and secretion profiles before and after differentiating to acquire a phagocytic capability, as well as during well-fed and nutrient-deprived conditions. By coupling the GAL4-UAS system to Translating Ribosome Affinity Purification (TRAP-seq) and proximity labeling (HRP-KDEL) followed by Liquid Chromatography tandem mass-spectrometry, we performed high-throughput screens to identify pathways selectively activated or repressed by follicle cells to employ nurse cell-clearance routines. We also integrated two publicly available single-cell RNAseq atlases of the Drosophila ovary to define the transcriptomic profiles of follicle cells. In this report, we describe the genes and major pathways identified in the screens and the striking consequences to Drosophila melanogaster oogenesis caused by RNAi perturbation of prioritized candidates. To our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind to comprehensively characterize two distinct apoptotic and non-apoptotic cell death paradigms in the same multi-cellular system. Beyond molecular differences in cell death, our investigation may also provide insights into how key systemic trade-offs are made between survival and reproduction when faced with physiological stress., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2025 Bandyadka et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

FlyBase (flybase.org) is a model organism database and knowledge base about Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly. Researchers from around the world rely on the genetic, genomic, and functional information available in FlyBase, as well as its tools to view and interrogate these data. In this article, we describe the latest developments and updates to FlyBase. These include the introduction of single-cell RNA sequencing data, improved content and display of functional information, updated orthology pipelines, new chemical reports, and enhancements to our outreach resources., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest: The author(s) declare no conflicts of interest., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Genetics Society of America.)

FlyBase provides a centralized resource for the genetic and genomic data of Drosophila melanogaster. As FlyBase enters our fourth decade of service to the research community, we reflect on our unique aspects and look forward to our continued collaboration with the larger research and model organism communities. In this study, we emphasize the dedicated reports and tools we have constructed to meet the specialized needs of fly researchers but also to facilitate use by other research communities. We also highlight ways that we support the fly community, including an external resources page, help resources, and multiple avenues by which researchers can interact with FlyBase., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Genetics Society of America.)

Since 1992, FlyBase has provided a freely available online database of information about the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Data in FlyBase is curated manually from research papers as well as computationally from a variety of relevant sources, to serve as an information hub that enables and accelerates research discovery. This chapter aims to give users new to the database an overview of the layout and types of data available, as well as introducing some tools with which to access the data. More experienced users will find useful information about recent improvements and descriptions to enable more efficient navigation of the database., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Programmed cell death and cell corpse clearance are an essential part of organismal health and development. Cell corpses are often cleared away by professional phagocytes such as macrophages. However, in certain tissues, neighboring cells known as nonprofessional phagocytes can also carry out clearance functions. Here, we use the Drosophila melanogaster ovary to identify novel genes required for clearance by nonprofessional phagocytes. In the Drosophila ovary, germline cells can die at multiple time points. As death proceeds, the epithelial follicle cells act as phagocytes to facilitate the clearance of these cells. We performed an unbiased kinase screen to identify novel proteins and pathways involved in cell clearance during two death events. Of 224 genes examined, 18 demonstrated severe phenotypes during developmental death and clearance while 12 demonstrated severe phenotypes during starvation-induced cell death and clearance, representing a number of pathways not previously implicated in phagocytosis. Interestingly, it was found that several genes not only affected the clearance process in the phagocytes, but also non-autonomously affected the process by which germline cells died. This kinase screen has revealed new avenues for further exploration and investigation., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Genetics Society of America.)