We are very happy to announce the winners of the two 2013 Faucett Catalyst Awards. The Awards, which are meant to stimulate research by C. elegans scientists on problems relating to parasitic nematodes, will be given to Jonathan Hodgkin of Oxford University (Comparing surface coat biochemistry in C. elegans and parasitic nematodes) and Jennifer Watts of Washington State University (Pilot studies to determine if the dietary fatty acid dihomogamma linolenic acid (DGLA) causes sterility in plant-parasitic nematodes). The evaluating committee (Martin Chalfie, Barton Slatko, SusanStrome, and William Sullivan) received twenty thoughtful proposals and narrowing the field to just two winners was very difficult. The committee hopes to raise additional funds, so that we can have a new competition next year.
Changes at WormBase
WormBase thanks Jonathan Hodgkin for years of superb community service handling genetic nomenclature. Tim Schedl will now serve as the genetic nomenclature coordinator and arbiter.
John Spieth, Tamberlyn Bieri and Phil Ozersky at the Washington University at St. Louis have retired from WormBase as of July 31. We thank them for more than a decade of tireless curation of C. elegans and other nematode sequence and gene models.
OrthoList Online Tool
A simple new online tool to facilitate C. elegans <–> human orthology assignments, based on OrthoList is available here.
Faucett Catalyst Grant deadline
The deadline for applications for the Faucett Catalyst Grants to attract C. elegans researchers to work on parasitic nematodes is August 15, 2013. Additional information here.
Check out the data querying templates in WormMine!
Recently, we released WormMine (available from the ‘Tools’ drop-down menu on WormBase), a data-mining tool of WormBase data. Be sure to check out the templates that we have created. Templates are ready-made queries useful for learning how to construct your own queries. To find them, look for the “Templates” tab at the top of WormMine next to the “Home” tab. Please note that this is a beta version of the tool that contains a subset of WormBase data. Later this year, WormMine will replace our previous data mining tool, WormMart.