A gene summary is a brief description of the key functional aspects of a gene and appears in the “Overview” widget of every gene page in WormBase. Recently we changed the rules for inclusion of data such as large scale expression cluster data and protein domain data in gene summaries. When functional data as represented by Gene Ontology (GO) process, function or cellular component annotations are available for a gene, these are used to generate a gene summary. When no GO annotations are available for a gene, then functional data from the orthologous human gene is included in the gene summary. Further, if no tissue or cellular expression is available for the gene, expression cluster and protein domain data are included in the gene summary. Please see the microPublication that describes these updates to the gene summaries for C. elegans and other nematodes in the WS294 release of WormBase.
Strain data update from CGC
WormBase regularly gets data from leading stock centers such as the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center (CGC) and National Bioresource Project (NBRP) . Release WS285 contains an extra-large update, with more than 1,500 new strains imported from the CGC. Perhaps there is one that is the perfect study object for you?