We are pleased to announce the addition of Human Disease Model Reports as of the FB2015_04 release of FlyBase. These reports highlight the role of systems modeled in flies on research into human disease and the potential impact of the results on translational research. One of the purposes of this report format is to provide a less specialized entry point for non-Drosophila researchers and for Drosophila researchers newly interested in Drosophila disease model systems. We intend this report to integrate in one place all the disease-related information from multiple reports in FlyBase. Each report includes links to and background information from other resources, most notably Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM^®); a table of related diseases based on an OMIM phenotypic series, including links to OMIM disease and gene reports and FlyBase Human Disease Model Reports; a table of information concerning relationships between human and fly orthologs; a summary of work done in Drosophila in non-specialist terms; curated descriptions of experimental work with links to references and to appropriate FlyBase allele records with more detailed information; a table of alleles reported to model human disease (see related commentary); and a list of relevant genetic reagents, with links to those available from public stock centers.

The current list of Human Disease Model Reports in FlyBase can be viewed here or here, and can be searched via the Simple Search or Human Disease tabs of QuickSearch, navigated to from the “Human Disease Model Data” section of Gene Reports, or via the Human Diseases button on Disease Ontology (DO) term reports in the Vocabularies tool.

Please be aware that this is the initial release of these integrated reports. We are actively working to add more disease model reports, a Human Disease Model Wiki for contributions from researchers, as well as a dedicated search tool for disease-related queries. We welcome feedback on these new Report pages via the Contact FlyBase form. We encourage researchers who have published a disease model paper to alert us by using the Fast Track Your Paper tool.