Call for nominations for WormBoard

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To all in the C. elegans community (please forward to your lab members!),

This is a call for nominations to fill vacancies and turnover on Wormboard. Nominations must be received by March 1, 2021. The entire election procedure and the responsibilities of WormBoard can be found on the WormBase wiki.

Self-nominations are allowed. All nominations shall be accompanied by a short statement (200 words max) explaining why the nominator thinks the nominee would be a good choice to become a WormBoard representative. Please highlight relevant background, experience and qualifications, particularly as they relate to diversity efforts.

For the US representatives, nominations of faculty from HSIs (Hispanic serving institutions) and HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) are specifically encouraged. For the 2021 election, the USA nominee MUST be a faculty member at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution.

Please note that each and every nominee will be considered. The number of people who nominate a candidate will not improve their chances of being selected for the final election slate.

Please indicate your nomination(s) on this Google Form.

Many thanks, 

WormBoard election committee

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Timeline for election: Elections will be held the first week of June in odd years starting 2021, before the International Worm meeting. 

  • February 1: call for nominations shall be sent out by the out-going president [this email]
  • March 1: deadline to return nominations 
  • March, April: slates for election to be drawn up
  • May 1: the slates shall be announced 
  • June 1-7: 1-week election period open to all community members 

Announcing the Mentor-Mentee matches for 2021

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With gratitude to all those who agreed to be mentors, and with thanks to the C. elegans Community Mentor Match program committee for 2020-2021, we announce the mentor-mentee matches for 2021. 

Read more about the program rollout.

Here’s a complete list of all 2021 Mentor-Mentee matches.

To those of you who offered to mentor but were not selected for a match this year, undoubtedly there will be opportunities in the future!! In the meantime, please stay tuned for these and other opportunities to serve the community. 

For those of you who did match, the committee plans to contact mentors and mentees mid-year to see how it is going. We will also solicit additional feedback to improve the program for the future. 

Best wishes, 

Jane

Neurogenetics Questionnaire

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To all Junior Scientists in the field of Neurogenetics,

We want to hear from you! We are postdocs from the groups of Drs.Oliver Hobert (Columbia University), Cecilia Moens (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) and Kate O’Connor-Giles (Brown University). We are interested in writing an article about the perspectives of early-career scientists (graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior principal investigators) on the future of Neurogenetics research, to be included in the upcoming special Neurogenetics Series in Genetics. By completing this questionnaire, your perspectives on the future of Neurogenetics research may be featured in the article.

Your timely feedback is much appreciated!

-Scott Gratz, Adam Isabella, Takuya Kaneko, Eduardo Levya-Diaz, HaoSheng Sun, Rajan Thakur.

Change to disease statements in gene descriptions for WS279

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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.