Congratulations to Steven Marygold this year’s Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career award recipient!
Steven has been group manager, curator and nomenclature advisor at FlyBase (flybase.org) for 20 years. During this time, he has made sustained, wide-ranging contributions to biocuration within FlyBase and the wider community in areas ranging from genetic, functional and disease model annotation, to bibliography management and ontology development. His work is described in over 40 publications.
Steven conceived the FlyBase Gene Group resource, which provides expert-curated, logically organised and systematically named gene family data for Drosophila melanogaster. This included a multi-year enzyme annotation project to review and validate GO/EC annotations for ~3,800 enzyme-encoding genes (26% of the proteome), detailed in two dedicated publications. That work led to the generation of FlyCyc, which provides a computed model of Drosophila metabolism, and an ongoing project to manually curate fly metabolic pathways as GO causal activity models (GO-CAMs). Steven also catalogued all ~4,000 ncRNA genes of Drosophila and coordinated their submission to RNAcentral, further demonstrating his cover-all approach to reviewing diverse, previously under-annotated gene classes. Steven is a major contributor to the Gene Ontology, identifying and reporting errors in catalytic and metabolic terms/annotations that propagate to dozens of downstream resources, and is actively involved in ontology development as a GO editor. He collaborates with Rhea, BioCyc, Reactome, RNACentral, UniProt, HGNC and the Alliance of Genome Resources, amplifying the reach of his curation well beyond FlyBase. Steven is also coordinating the establishment of a FlyBase subscription model to cover the loss of US federal funding to the UK site.
Steven’s career is a model of how rigorous, sustained expert biocuration impacts across the bioinformatics and research communities, building lasting community-wide infrastructure.
Publications
- Garapati PV, Zaru R, Attrill H, dos Santos G, Goodman J, Thurmond J, Marygold SJ. (2026) Comprehensive annotation of the enzymes of Drosophila melanogaster. G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics 16(2):jkaf294 DOI:10.1093/g3journal/jkaf294
- Marygold SJ. (2025) FlyCyc: a Pathway/Genome Database for the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. https://biocyc.org/organism-summary?object=DMEL
- Öztürk-Çolak A, Marygold SJ, Antonazzo G, Attrill H, Goutte-Gattat D, Jenkins VK, Matthews BB, Millburn G, dos Santos G, Tabone CJ, FlyBase Consortium. (2024) FlyBase: updates to the Drosophila genes and genomes database. Genetics 227(1):iyad211. DOI:10.1093/genetics/iyad211
- Marygold SJ, Chan PP, Lowe TM. (2022) Systematic identification of tRNA genes in Drosophila melanogaster. microPublication Biology 000560. DOI:10.17912/micropub.biology.000560
- Attrill H, Falls K, Goodman JL, Millburn GH, Antonazzo G, Rey AJ, Marygold SJ, FlyBase Consortium. (2016) FlyBase: establishing a Gene Group resource for Drosophila melanogaster. Nucleic Acids Research 44(D1):D786–D792. DOI:10.1093/nar/gkv1046
ORCID: 0000-0003-2759-266X