Reminder: the abstract submission for the 21st International Worm meeting, to be held at UCLA in June 2017, closes on the 30th March.
‘The Genetics of Axon Guidance and Axon Regeneration’ in WormBook, GENETICS
Check out the chapter ‘The Genetics of Axon Guidance and Axon Regeneration in Caenorhabditis elegans‘ from WormBook in GENETICS, by
Call for IWM 2017 Workshops … and Worm Videos
Website: The website for the C. elegans international meeting, 2017 is up.
Workshops: The deadline for proposing a workshop is 15 November 2016: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/celeganswkshp
WormShow: We regret to announce that Morris and Curtis have retired from doing the Worm Show. With the guidance of Ahna Skop we are planning a new format WormShow involving community submissions of videos or other performance art. More details will be available later on the meeting website but in the mean time please think about participating by producing a video!
–Marie-Anne Felix and Andrew Chisholm
Please take the Alliance of Genome Resources Survey
Please take the Alliance of Genome Resources Survey. Your response is very important to us and will let funding agencies know how important model organism databases such as WormBase and other genome resources are to your research.
Please support Model Organism Databases (MODs)
Model Organisms such as yeast, worm, fly, fish, and mouse are key drivers of biological research, providing experimental systems that yield insights into human biology and health. Model Organism Databases (MODs) and other genome resources like Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium enable researchers all over the world to uncover basic, conserved biological mechanisms relevant to new medical therapies.
NHGRI/NIH has recently advanced a plan to reduce MOD funding while encouraging these resources to share as much infrastructure as possible. While there are a number of advantages of more integration such as consistent user interfaces and vocabularies, unless other sources of funding are found to offset the planned cuts, core functions at WormBase such as extraction of information from papers and genome annotation will be affected. The Worm Board, worm community leaders and other model organism community leaders have come together to write a Statement of Support for the MODs and the GO. We ask all scientists who value the community-specific nature of the MODs to sign this ‘open letter’. We urge you to add your name, and to spread the word to all researchers who value these resources.
Please sign this letter!