2023 C. elegans Community Mentor Match program

Dear Worm Community,

The Mentor Match committee is happy to announce the roll out of the 2023 C. elegans Community Mentor Match Program! 

As a MENTOR, you can:

  • Share your knowledge and expertise to facilitate the professional growth of young C. elegansresearchers; 
  • Establish new connections with talented scientists;
  • Help foster a diverse community of worm scientists around the globe;
  • Gain exposure to broad and diverse perspectives;

For further information about the program, please see this link.

If you are willing to serve as a MENTOR, please sign up here before December 1*.

*Mentors can be postdocs, faculty members, or non-academic scientists with a C. elegansbackground.

*Note that the prospective mentor list will be made public for prospective mentees to browse.

*Please fill out the survey this year even if you have served as a mentor in the past. 

(You do not have to fill it out if you are simply maintaining an existing mentoring relationship, only if you are available for a new mentee).

Please forward this email to anyone who may not be on the WormBase email list! We would particularly like to reach former worm folks who are NOT currently in academia and may be interested in acting as a mentor for worm people considering non-academic career paths.

 A MENTEE survey will be announced via WormBase in December, as soon as the prospective mentors are in place. Stay tuned!

With best wishes,

-The C. elegans Community Mentor Match committee for 2022-23.

Meera Sundaram 
Andrea Calixto Mohor
Heather Bennett
Brent Derry
Jon Hibshman
Massimo Hilliard
Sandhya Koushika
Jeff Medley
Dan Shaye
Sander van den Heuvel

Two new species join the Alliance of Genome Resources!

Check out the latest new release (5.3.0) of the Alliance of Genome Resources (Alliance) which includes two new species–Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropocalis and data refreshes for many data types. The Alliance features standardized and harmonized views for data such as disease models, Gene Ontology (GO), orthology, genetic interactions and many more, for a total of 9 species including C. elegans, human and the two new frog species. Learn more about this release via the 5.3.0 Release Notes.

The clones are back

Good news for those of you using the C. elegans libraries held at Wellcome Sanger Institute – they have just restarted distribution of the C. elegans clone libraries they hold. The webpage is currently under development, so please email bioresource@sanger.ac.uk directly with your requests.

Analysis refresh of Brugia malayi

WormBase build WS285 contains an analysis refresh of the Brugia malayi genome, so – expect, for example, new and better homologs and expression data. Did you know that WormBase contains 9 species in addition to C. elegans? All of these species have unique manually curated data and gene models.