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.
New journal for Nematode studies
Check out Nematoda, a new open-access journal publishing scientific articles, scientific notes, reviews and personal viewpoints on all topics related to nematodes!
Human disease model data in WormBase
You don’t have to look anywhere else to see if the gene of your interest is a genetic model for human disease! Both manually curated and orthology-based human disease related data for genes is presented on the gene page in the the ‘Overview’ section and in the ‘Human Diseases’ widget in the side-bar. This data indicates whether the gene is an ‘Experimental model’ for a human disease based on experimental evidences from the manually curated literature, or a ‘Potential model’ based on orthology with a human gene/s. You can also search by a disease term (DO term) from the autocomplete search box at the top of every web page, eg., ‘Alzheimer’s disease’. Currently, over 250 genes have been manually curated, for their relevance to human disease and several hundred genes are flagged as potential models, based on orthology to human disease genes. The relevant human genes from the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) database and associated diseases are displayed as well. Currently we are working to improve disease displays and will continue to expand this data. Please let us know if we have missed a published experimental disease model in C. elegans!
C. elegans paper wins AAAS Newcomb Cleaveland Prize for best Science paper
Congratulations to Jarrell, T.A., et. al, (Science 337: 437-444, 2012), the authors of a study describing the complete wiring diagram for the part of the nervous system that controls mating behavior in the C. elegans male . This paper was chosen as the most outstanding paper published in Science in the year June 2012 to May 2013.
Quick tips on how to use the Gene Ontology
WormBase uses ontologies developed by the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium to describe the biology of genes. For a quick and informative article on using the GO, please see this paper in PLOS Computational Biology.