Genomes for the entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae and four congeners–S. scapterisci, S. monticolum, S. feltiae, and S. glaseri are now available in WormBase Parasite. Check out the paper describing these genomes.
New Textpresso for OMIM!
The Textpresso project serves the biomedical research community by providing full text searches of the C. elegans published literature, as well as other model organism literatures. Recently Textpresso for Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), was developed, this contains approximately 25,000 entries from OMIM. The entries are separated into their various fields: eg., clinical synopsis (CS), number (NO), references (RF), creation date (CD), etc. One can use Textpresso search capabilities to search for various diseases, genes, etc. within OMIM entries. An intersection of these searches can be created with various categories that are integrated as part of Textpresso, for a more refined targeted search. Those categories are: gene ontology (GO), sequence ontology (SO), human anatomy (UBERON) and human phenotype ontology (HPO). Entries are downloaded from the OMIM website and updated for Textpresso weekly.
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.
'Mind of a Worm' paper one of the most significant papers!
The ‘Mind of a Worm’ paper was chosen as one of 18 most significant biological papers published by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society over its 350 year history. See the commentary written by Dr. Scott Emmons, additionally all the life sciences papers as well as the physical sciences articles in this issue can be accessed!
New in WS246: Curation of Wnt signaling papers
Wnt signaling in C. elegans, both canonical and non-canonical, governs cell polarity and asymmetric cell divisions that ultimately affect endoderm specification, vulva and gonad development, neuroblast migration, neuron branching and outgrowth, formation of the postdeirid sensilla and male tail ray and spicule formation (see WormBook chapters on Wnt signaling for reviews). For the WS246 and WS247 releases of WormBase, WormBase curators have focused on curating papers directly relevant to Wnt signaling in C. elegans. This curation includes Wnt-related genetic and regulatory interactions, anatomy function, mutant phenotypes (by allele and RNAi), expression patterns, Gene Ontology annotations, and cross-species gene orthology and gene models for other nematode species.