Dr. David Houle has developed a semi-automated system for measuring the wings of Drosophilid flies. The process generates images of every wing measured. In 2004 he put 30,000 images of Drosophila melanogaster wings on Morphbank during the initial phase of the Website. In 2006 Dr. Houle was contacted by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Computational Biology who noticed this large selection of images drawn from populations of a single species. These data are useful to them as a test data set to develop methods of image analysis that takes genetics into account. They are funded by NIH's roadmap initiative and invited Dr. Houle to apply for a 'driving biological problem' grant through their center to facilitate a collaboration focused on my data. He then recruited other Florida State University faculty Wu-Min Deng, Washington Mio and Xiuwen Liu, to generate a new wing data set that focuses on the effects of specific mutations, as well as on techniques to measure other parts of the fly.

This project was funded by the UCLA center, and work will begin in summer 2007.