The recording of the WormBase webinar “Parasite Biomart” is now available for viewing. Please check out this page for the relevant links to past and coming webinars as well as for webinar registration.
Change to disease statements in gene descriptions for WS279
Due to non-stringent human ortholog(s) and their associated diseases, C. elegans gene descriptions (displayed in the “Overview widget” of gene pages) often had spurious diseases associated with their human orthologs. With WS279, we imposed a stringency filter and only those disease associations to ortholog(s) called by more than one orthology prediction method are included in the gene description. This change has improved the accuracy of statements that read “human orthologs of this gene are implicated in <disease(s)>”. However, please note that this change has also resulted in the loss of such statements for several hundred gene descriptions due to the increased stringency.
Overview of WormBase, Sept 2020
If you’d like to get an overview of WormBase datatypes, tools, the Author First Pass form and learn about Micropublication Biology, please take a look at the slides from a talk given by Chris Grove, a WormBase curator. This was presented at the Boston area worm meeting on Sept 23rd, 2020.
Paper of Interest – The CeMbio resource
Check out the resource described in “CeMbio – The Caenorhabiditis elegans Microbiome Resource“.
WormBase updated to WS276
A new release of WormBase, WS276 is live on the website. Please see the release notes which contain complete information about this release.
Data changes: note that C. elegans gene descriptions in the “Overview” section of gene pages have improved orthology statements to human genes. WormBase uses theĀ DIOPTĀ orthology data from theĀ Alliance of Genome ResourcesĀ and has increased stringency by displaying only those human orthologs that have been determined by three or more methods. This should significantly improve the orthology data in WormBase which is also reflected in the gene descriptions.Ā
Known Issues: the circRNAs failed mapping so sequence and genomic position are not available for this release, but will be in the WS277 release.