The contents of the European Drosophila Stock Centres in Umeå, Sweden, and Szeged, Hungary have been expanded to over 10,000 well documented mutant Drosophila stocks. Most of the stocks have been donated by European Drosophila research labs, or been produced at the partner labs, partly also within this project. The collection in Umeå mainly consists of stocks with visible mutations, chromsomal aberrations, and genetical tools for research purposes. The Szeged Stock Centre is more directed towards maintaining collections of P-element induced lethal mutant stocks. These lines have during this project been made available to the European research community and is an invaluable source of mutants that has been screened for a large variety of purposes. In parallel, the characterization of these stocks have continued. All strains are freely available to researchers in the Member states.
Stock requests from the two Stock Centres has increased every year since the start of this project. In 1997, Umeå shipped 3,684 stocks to labs around the world. During 1999, Umeå and Szeged together shipped over 22,000 lines. One cause to this increase was that the genetic information of all mutant strains at both Stock Centres was displayed in the database « FlyBase » on Internet and thus was made easily available to the European research community. Fly requests also became extremely simplified, when a fly order form was included in FlyBase, which was connected to the stock lists and which sent the requests electronically to the two European Stock Centres.
The partnership labs have played a vital role in the characterization of the P-element lines and in actively exploiting the P-element line collection within their field of expertise, exemplified by neurogenesis, tumour suppression, cell cycle regulation, cell differentiation, cell signalling, gene regulation and chromatin structure.