GO annotation: maximizing the potential of Drosophila research to benefit human health

How can it be that the tiny, innocuous fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has revolutionised the understanding of genetics, development, growth, aging and disease for the benefit of human health and well-being? The answer is: we are not that different. The fruit fly has many commonalities with us - body parts: limbs, brain, heart, eyes, kidney; it behaves in similar ways: sleeps, walks, remembers, forgets; and perceives the world in the similar manner: sight, smell, taste and touch.
At the level of DNA we can see that many genes in Drosophila and humans are equivalent and many basic physiological, cell biological and behavioural mechanisms are fundamentally the same. We can do many studies in flies that simply would not be possible in more complex organisms - especially in humans, both for practical and ethical reasons. Importantly, human diseases can be 'modelled' in flies - for example by making the same mutations in the equivalent fly genes or by exposing flies to damaging environments. In this way we 'give' Drosophila human diseases - from Alzheimer's disease to kidney stones. Then we can use these flies to discover what causes the disease symptoms and help develop treatments. It seems remarkable, but fruit flies can provide real answers to individuals and families with complex diseases.
All the research using Drosophila generates a tremendous amount of information - more than any researcher can read (over 2,800 research articles/year). This is where biological databases come in: they have dedicated teams of people (curators) who read the published research papers and enter the information into a computer database in a standardized manner. This means that the information can be easily found, rapidly assimilated, compared with other data, and integrated to generate new discoveries.
The aim of our project is to use a standardized scientific vocabulary, called the Gene Ontology (GO), to describe what genes do and where they do it. The importance of having a...