A swarm of flies is about to descend upon the town of Bloomington, Indiana— and scientists couldn’t be more delighted.

Thanks to a $364,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the nation’s largest repositories for investigatory Drosophila melanogaster strains will be able to more than double its capacity. Currently, the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, located at Indiana University, houses some 30,000 strains of Drosophila, comprising an array of mutations and research possibilities. Now that library will expand to up to 70,000 genetic variants.

Most of the HHMI money will be going towards building a bigger ‘fly kitchen’, where the substance that the flies are grown on and feed off of is made.

“It’s sort of like polenta, for all intents and purposes,” says Thom Kaufman, the director of the stock center. The new fly kitchen will be getting slick new appliances, upgrading from a 20-gallon vat to an 80-gallon vat in order to cook larger amounts of the cornmeal, sugar, and agar mixture.

The funds will also help expand the center’s storage capacity to accommodate all of the new stocks. Kaufman is especially excited about new strains of Drosophila that are specially modified to allow researchers to do RNAi knockdowns. All the strains that the center maintains are donated by investigators, and they’ll ship flies to any qualified group that places an order, be they from academia or industry.

“We’re like the L.L. Bean of the fruit fly world,” Kaufman says.

One of the contributors to the stock center is Nancy Bonini, a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania and an investigator at HHMI. She’s working on a (still-unpublished) project involving flies with a mutation in a gene linked to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in humans. In the video below, you can see the difference in motor ability between the mutated flies (on the left) and normal flies (on the right).

These flies aren’t yet residing at the stock center, but Bonini has contributed other strains that exhibit symptoms similar to Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.