The Fly Cell Atlas (www.flycellatlas.org) brings together Drosophila researchers interested in single-cell genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenomics, to build comprehensive cell atlases during different developmental stages and disease models. The FCA has organised two FCA meetings (Dec 2017 in Leuven and Mar 2019 at Janelia Farm), and one workshop at the EDRC in Lausanne (Sep 2019). It is a "grassroots movement", currently without funding or formal structure.

After the 2019 FCA meeting at Janelia Farm, several initiatives have been launched within ad hoc FCA working groups:
(1) a draft overview of the FCA goals has been written as a potential contribution to the Human cell Atlas white paper (HCA; https://www.humancellatlas.org/files/HCA_WhitePaper_18Oct2017.pdf).
(2) a technical discussion started with FlyBase, the EBI single cell atlas and the HCA to prepare for a central repository and data sharing of single-cell fly data.
(3) plans were made together with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Biohub to obtain single-cell transcriptomes of "all" Drosophila tissues in one go. The current questionnaire is related to this last initiative.


The CZI Biohub initiative:
The FCA is planning a collaborative effort to perform single-cell RNA-seq and single-nucleus RNA-seq on a large number of Drosophila tissues, supported by the CZI Biohub. On 29th of August, we will have an organisational FCA meeting from 8-11am (Pacific time) hosted at the Biohub.
In addition to new data that will be generated for ~250,000 cells, we envision a data integration effort to integrate existing and future data into the FCA, to map data sets from various labs onto this "backbone", and to import FCA data into the HCA.
To get an overview of existing data and ongoing efforts, and to estimate the required depth of coverage for each tissue, we kindly call for participation in this questionnaire.

(All answers will, of course, be treated confidentially)