WormBase updated to the WS270 release

Alliance orthologs

Starting from WS270 we are using the Alliance of Genome ResourcesĀ for orthologs between model organism genes. This should be more comprehensive and include the latest data from our sister databases.

VC2010 genome

An assembly and geneset of the VC2010 C.elegans strain has been added and work is ongoing to improve the integration and display of strain specific data. Additionally more mappings of N2 annotation will be included in future releases.

SGD turns 25!

25 years ago the SGD (The Saccharomyces Genome Database) went online.Ā  Happy Birthday SGD!

SGD provides comprehensive integrated biological information for the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae along with search and analysis tools to explore these data, enabling the discovery of functional relationships between sequence and gene products in fungi and higher organisms.

WormBase collaborates with SGD and several other model organism databases to facilitate data harmonization and cross-species searches at theĀ Alliance of Genome Resources.Ā  Check it out!

Short WormBase downtime yesterday

WormBase went down at 2.54pm ET yesterday. The problem was caused ironically by a fault recovery mechanism that was introduced recently. The fault recovery mechanism takes faulty servers out of service and replaces them with healthy ones. The process involves two components:the detection of faulty servers and the creation of new ones.

Two simultaneous problems in the two components lead to the failure. A false positive in detecting the faulty server caused the sever to be taken out of service, and a missing hard drive snapshot caused the failure to start new servers.

To avoid such future occurrences we are looking into ways to make the fault detection more specific and prevent important disk snapshots from being deleted by automated processes.

Most of the web services were restored around 5 pm ET. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.