// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects
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Many modern biology studies rely on curated databases that scientists hardly notice until they are gone. PomBase, the knowledge hub for the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, has lost its long-term support from UK funder Wellcome. Another knowledge portal, FlyBase — for research on Drosophila fruit flies — lost funding for its curation team when awards from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) were cut in 2025. And after a funding gap, the human gene-nomenclature database HGNC secured one NIH award in 2024.
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