New operons in C. briggsae

Kindly, Dr. Itai Antoine Toker made us aware of the paper Uyar et al. Genome Research 2012 (PMID: 22772596/ WBPaper00041271), which contains a genome-wide set of operon predictions for C. briggsae. The data was mapped forward to the current gene set using the Sequence IDs supplied. 1034 operons were captured from the publication, but because of the time between publication and extensive re-annotation of C. briggsae only 709 of these operons had enough information to allow us to map them precisely onto the genome and supplement the C. briggsae operon JBrowse track. If you find some interesting dataset you’d like WormBase to curate, please let us know at help@wormbase.org

WS247: C. briggsae genes have descriptions!

In the previous WS246 release we introduced automated gene descriptions for C. elegans genes that lacked a manually written one. These gene descriptions include information related to orthology, process, function and sub-cellular localization (when these data-types have been curated in the WormBase database), giving the user a quick overview of the gene. The current WS247 release includes automated descriptions for over 18,000 C. briggsae genes.  Check out the C. briggase gene pages to view these descriptions under ‘Overview’!  In future releases, we will add genes from many more species!  Also, WormBase is working on user-friendly forms which you can use to edit these descriptions and make them better.

Featured Paper: The origin and function of anti-fungal peptides in C. elegans

The origin and function of anti-fungal peptides in C. elegans: open questions
by Nathalie Pujol, Paul A. Davis* and Jonathan J. Ewbank

This paper describes a gene-class of short proteins expressed during fungal challenge and covers most nematodes included in WormBase.

Front Immunol. 2012;3:237. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2012.00237. Epub 2012 Aug 1.

*Disclaimer: Paul Davis is a WormBase curator at the EBI