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Stock/plasmid keeping services


Vienna Drosophila Resource Center (VDRC) is a non-profit research infrastructure whose immediate goal is to maintain and distribute transgenic RNAi lines and other resources to Drosophila researchers, both locally and internationally.

We wish to further develop and expand our resources according to the emerging new technologies and community needs.

Towards this goal, the VDRC is open to donations of highly used Drosophila resources for integration into its “community stock center” collection. See “Donating Resources - Community Stock Center” for details.

In addition, we offer a "private stock keeping service" where we will maintain and distribute your personal fly stock collection on your behalf at your own cost. See “Private Stock Keeping Service” for details.

If you wish to donate or deposit resources with the VDRC please contact us to discuss as early as possible: office@vdrc.at.

Benefits of donating resources to the VDRC
  • The VDRC enables your resources (e.g. transgenic fly stocks, plasmids) to be visible and available to the worldwide Drosophila research community.
  • Saves time and money associated with processing requests and shipping materials.
  • Donor information for each resource is visible on our website and users are required to credit you as the original source of the materials.
  • Requests for your resources are tracked and a summary can be provided upon request.
  • The VDRC has extensive experience of stock maintenance and distribution - your resource will be in safe hands!

Under this service you have the possibility of donating your Drosophila-related resources (stocks, plasmids etc.) to the VDRC for integration into our public collection (community stock center).

  • Resources can be donated to the community stock center if they are considered to be of broad interest to the Drosophila research community both currently and in the future.
  • Resources will not be accepted if they are likely to be of niche interest to only a few laboratories.
  • The resources must be fully public, preferably with a publication accepted.
  • Subject to scientific and financial approval, VDRC will take over ownership of the resource(s) and will maintain and distribute them.
  • The resources will be made available to the whole research community via the VDRC online ordering system.
  • The resources should be exclusively distributed by the VDRC and not via other stock centers or labs.
  • Fly stocks must be healthy at 18°C and stable without selection.

For this service, the following conditions apply:

  • The resources, plus all essential information required by users to select them, are fully public.
  • VDRC takes full ownership and full financial risk for the resources.
  • As the owners, VDRC has the freedom to distribute resources to any researcher for any purpose, set fees as they see fit and decide which resources are no longer financially viable. For the resources deemed financially non-viable, most likely due to limited requests from the community, there are two options:
    a) VDRC has the right to discard any stocks/plasmids after first offering them back to the donor.
    b) VDRC will continue to maintain the resource on condition that a party (e.g. the original donor) covers the difference between the income generated by these stocks/plasmids (from user fees) and the full costs of maintaining them.

How to donate resources

  • Contact the VDRC as soon as possible by sending an e-mail to office@vdrc.at with brief details of your resource (stocks and/or plasmids).
  • Once we have sufficient information, we will weigh up the value to the community against our budget and space constraints to decide whether your resource donation can be accepted into the VDRC community stock center.
  • Once approved, we will request additional details associated with your resource for the website - e.g. full genotype (compliant with FlyBase nomenclature), phenotypic description, markers, references, sequence files, plasmid maps, relevant links, etc.
  • We will then ask you to sign a formal agreement before getting you to send your resource to the VDRC for integration into the VDRC community stock center.

VDRC offers to maintain your personal fly stock/plasmid collection on your behalf and will accept both published and unpublished resources. This service may be useful if you have valuable stocks which you do not use regularly but do not want to discard, or if you spend time shipping stocks or plasmids to other labs and would like VDRC to do this on your behalf.

For this service, the following conditions apply:

  • Full maintenance and distribution costs (staff, consumables, overheads) must be paid by the owner, with no financial burden or risk for VDRC.
  • The stocks are private and are not owned by VDRC. The depositor remains the owner.
  • Stocks are maintained and distributed by VDRC on behalf of the owner.
  • Stocks will not be made publicly visible via VDRC unless specifically requested.
  • Those stocks which the owner wishes to be fully visible will be made available for ordering by any registered VDRC user.
  • Stocks which the owner does not wish to be publicly visible cannot be ordered via the VDRC website. VDRC cannot accept orders for these stocks directly but will send stocks anywhere at the request of the owner, with shipping at the recipient's expense.

Please enquire for current charges and billing procedure: office@vdrc.at