Include strain names in publications!

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We urge you to explicitly state strains used in your experiments to foster reproducibility and to help WormBase biocurators get your results into WormBase.

 Historically, C. elegans researchers just stated the alleles used, based on the reasonable idea that all strains were close to Brenner’s N2.  As the years and hundreds of worm generations passed, strains diverged.  We usually don’t know the full genotype of our strains (and really won’t even with whole genome sequencing since copy number variation is often hard to detect). Including strain names will greatly help sort out any background effects that are realized later.

 We thus would like to see editors and reviewers (both anonymous and within the laboratory) help enforce the inclusion of strain names in C. elegans papers.

-Paul Sternberg

Wondering how to cite WormBase?

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If you are looking to cite WormBase please take a look at: https://wormbase.org/about/citing_wormbase#012–10. This can also be accessed from the Menu at the bottom of the WormBase home page on the extreme left, under WormBase–>How to cite.  Please do explicitly acknowledge WormBase in your published work when you have used it in the planning, design, execution, analysis, or reporting of the research described.  We can then search for these acknowledgements and use these numbers in various reports, eg. for funding agencies, etc.

Please specify allele and strain names in publications

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WormBase curates data from published papers and attaches different types of data such as phenotype, overview, expression, human disease model, etc., to genetic entities such as genes, alleles, strains or transgenes. These are also bonafide  ‘objects’ in our database which allow us to attach data to them.  If we cannot find these named genetic entities in your paper it becomes extremely difficult for us to curate the paper.  It is not enough to just specify the amino acid or nucleic acid change of a mutation, we need either the strain or allele name to curate the paper.

WormBase Version WS262

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If you noticed, version WS262 has been out for several days.  The version number present at the top of the WormBase home page is now a link to the Release Notes which is a concise summary listing the various data types and their numbers.  Check it out if you want to get a quick view of the breadth and depth of the data in WormBase and to see what has changed since the last release.  Also find the list of data files available for this release, on our FTP site.