The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) plans to initiate a model organism ENCODE (modENCODE) Project that will try to identify all of the sequence-based functional elements in the Caenorhabditis elegans and/or Drosophila melanogaster genomes. The project will be run as a Research Network called the modENCODE Consortium which is supported by two RFAs. The first RFA (RFA-HG-06-006) solicits applications for a set of projects that will conduct experiments to identify functional elements in the target genomes and the second RFA (RFA-HG-06-007) solicits applications to participate in the Research Network as a Data Coordination Center. Both experimental and computational approaches will be part of modENCODE and the project will be associated with, but separate from, the human ENCODE (ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements) Project that was launched by NHGRI in 2003. Questions about the modENCODE Project should be directed to either Elise Feingold or Peter Good at [email protected]
Positions available with the Textpresso project
Textpresso, the software that powers the literature search at WormBase and other model organism databases, has two positions available at Caltech: Biological curator at WormBase (contact Paul Sternberg) and Software Developer (contact Michael Muller).
New release of WormBase, WS154
WormBase has been updated to the WS154 release of the database. This release introduces a collection of fosmids from the C. elegans Reverse Genetics Core Facility in Vancouver. You can view these fosmids on the Sequence Summary and on the Genome Browser under the “YACs, Fosmids, and Cosmids” track. These fosmids may be ordered directly from GeneService.
New WormBook chapters now available
WormBook now contains over 80 published contributions. Chapters recently added to WormBook include: Somatic sex determination, RTKRas/MAP kinase signaling, Mechanism and regulation of translation in C. elegans, Homologs of the Hh signalling network in C. elegans, Cell division, A quick tour of nematode diversity and the backbone of nematode phylogeny, Signaling in the immune response, Germline chromatin, Germline genomics, Intracellular trafficking, and Nomarski images for learning the anatomy, with tips for mosaic analysis. For a monthly email containing information about new additions to WormBook, please sign up at www.wormbook.org/announce.html.
WormBase content now searchable via Google
A large portion of the content of WormBase is now searchable by Google. To restrict a Google search to the contents of WormBase, use the format site:www.wormbase.org YOUR TERMS (for example site:www.wormbase.org exocytosis). Please note that the cached content at Google may not be as up-to-date as that at WormBase. We will be providing a mechanism to use Google to search WormBase directly in the next few days.