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.
Strain data update from CGC
WormBase regularly gets data from leading stock centers such as the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center (CGC) and National Bioresource Project (NBRP) . Release WS285 contains an extra-large update, with more than 1,500 new strains imported from the CGC. Perhaps there is one that is the perfect study object for you?
For miRNA fans
For miRNA fanatics out there, we have added 90 miRNA gene clusters from MirGeneDB to the C. elegans annotation in release WS284. This complements the 20 clusters (800 objects) which were already there, making the WormBase miRNA collection possibly the most complete in the world. You can access the miRNAs through the web pages https://wormbase.org/search/all/miRNA, or through JBrowse tracks “Curated Genes(noncoding)” e. g. And don’t forget WormBase also has an impressive collection of other non-coding RNAs as well; circRNAs, lincRNAs, piRNAs, snRNA, snoRNAs, precursors and many more. Happy investigating!
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