Sonia Hall is working with the GSA in a newly-created role as Program Director for Early Career Scientist Engagement. Executive Director Tracey DePellegrin spoke with Sonia about why focusing on helping this group of scientists is so important, including plans to start a GSA steering committee led by graduate students & postdocs.

Sonia received her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology in 2015 from the University of Kansas. As a graduate student, she became a Trainee Advisory Member of the GSA Education Committee, and later became a Trainee Advisory Representative for the GSA Board of Directors (2014-2016). As a graduate student and postdoc, Sonia has been engaged in the national conversation about workforce issues surrounding PhD trained scientists. She led or assisted in the development and implementation of numerous professional development events and programs for early career researchers, including events at The Allied Genetics Conference. Sonia is completing a one-year fellowship in the Center for Biomedical Career Development at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She is also building career and professional development curricula and assisting in data analysis for the NIH BEST-funded programs at UMass Med. 

Tracey DePellegrin: I’m delighted to work with you again! You’ve contributed so much to GSA and to our members. But let’s turn the tables: what are some of the ways GSA has influenced your scientific career?

Sonia Hall: Oh my goodness – where do I even begin? My participation in GSA activities has been my source of professional skills development. From written and oral communication, leadership, project management, program development and more, I’ve learned it from GSA under the mentorship of GSA staff and membership.

One important experience was Beth Ruedi asking me to assist in organizing the very first trainee bootcamp for GSA. She gave me complete creative control over half of the event and empowered me to see my vision through. I reached out to individuals whose work I had admired from afar, like Ethan Perlstein, Lynn Cooley, and Jason Tennessen! The opportunity also taught me quite a bit about the logistics involved in planning scientific conferences.

TD: The majority of our members are early career scientists, many of whom are facing uncertain funding, competitive environments, and long hours, among other things. How can the GSA best serve this group?

SH: It’s important to integrate professional development opportunities with society activities. This allows members to have access to quality and career-enhancing experiences but with minimal impact to research productivity. I want early career scientists to leave any experience with GSA feeling that their time away from the research setting was worth the investment.

I also want early career scientist members to have an active voice within the society and in the larger scientific community. They are the future of our community and their voices should be represented within the society.

Here at the GSA, I’m building an early career scientist steering committee that will be led by graduate student and postdoc members. The committee will focus on three main areas of interest: building relationships with professionals and companies in the larger scientific community, engaging in early career advocacy efforts, and communicating the impact of fundamental discoveries that originated in the model organism community.  

TD: You’ve said that your first experience at a GSA meeting was transformative. Can you speak to that?

SH: Being an undergraduate student, I didn’t understand what the scientific community really was. I had an exceptional undergraduate research mentor, GSA member Robert Ward at the University of Kansas, who provided the opportunity for me to attend the 2011 Annual Drosophila Research Conference. I had never presented my work to other fly people, and I just remember thinking that I was way out of my league.

But there I was with Rob, who later became my graduate advisor, hanging our poster in this giant exhibit hall. People asked me about my work and were genuinely interested in my contribution to our project. Rob was wonderful about introducing me to his former colleagues, friends, and other scientists working in our field.

Science became more than a field of study during that meeting; it became a collection of passionate, creative, and talented people working together. I felt, and still feel, so fortunate to get to contribute to this amazing community.

TD: What is your sense of the biggest challenges faced by today’s graduate students and postdocs in genetics (and related fields)?

SH: I’d say the state of the workforce. Having PhDs working outside of academia isn’t new, but the growing number of PhDs entering other sectors brings challenges. This increasing diversity in career outcomes is concerning because graduate and postdoctoral training programs focus on academic careers; this leaves the majority underprepared for their transition into a non-academic career. We need to modernize graduate education nationally. Many approaches are being tested and evaluated across the country, including here at UMass Med. I’m fortunate to work closely with innovative thinkers like Morgan Thompson, Cynthia Fuhrmann, and Mary Ellen Lane on addressing this critical need.

This modernization of graduate education is viewed as a challenge for a variety of reasons. Our academic system has successfully demonstrated their ability to produce highly specialized scientists. We train graduate students and postdocs, who make tremendous contributions to the scientific enterprise in the form of data collection and analysis. The work conducted through the training partnerships of faculty mentors and their students and postdocs is a major driver of scientific progress in our country.

That said, ideally, solutions to help the younger workforce shouldn’t have a negative impact on scientific output. Additionally, many of us are trained using funds from federal grants. The question does arise as to whether these funds are achieving the desired return on their investment when a trainee decides not to continue a research career.

To me the challenge is not so much about retaining each individual in a research position — because not everyone desires a position in intensive scientific research — but rather demonstrating that there is a very real economic benefit to having trained scientists working in a variety of sectors.

TD:  What’s your advice for young scientists facing those problems?

SH: They should reach out for career development. There are many opportunities to develop professional skills that are beneficial both within and outside of the research setting. Take action to develop a diverse set of skills early in your training, and don’t wait until it is time to make a transition. If opportunities don’t exist around you, create them yourself!

I often reflect back on the example that my mother set for me when I was growing up. If she saw a problem or need or was dissatisfied with something, she did something to change it. She sacrificed so much of herself to improve the lives of others – I guess that has left a fundamental mark on me as an individual and professional.

TAD: I’ve always been impressed by your thoughtfulness, energy, and commitment to the projects in which you engage. What’s your inspiration?

SH: I’m just one person with an interest and passion. But, if I create an opportunity for others to join us, we can have a greater impact on our community. That really inspires me to create collaborative projects.

I believe deeply in giving back to the communities that have shaped who I am. The scientific community has played a big part in that for me. I was really inspired by my graduate mentor to advocate for the advancement of the genetics community. He demonstrated for me the commitment to deepen our understanding of the biological world, our responsibility to mentor others, and the importance of the each person’s work, regardless of the prestige of their grant funding, elite institution, training pedigree, etc.

We were a small lab without a large research grant. But, that never stopped Rob from having a major impact on those that he taught or mentored. He also never hesitated to provide precious antibodies, other reagents, or scientific insight to the Drosophila community. I trained under this incredible individual and in some way; I see the programs I develop as furthering his investment.

The Allied Genetics Conference was an experiment for the GSA. We brought together under one roof seven separate research community meetings: C. elegans, ciliate, Drosophila, mouse, yeast, zebrafish, and population, evolutionary, and quantitative genetics.

Today we are launching another experiment, this time, to communicate results presented at the meeting. Thanks to a generous grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we have published a meeting report in G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics and have posted more than 280 presentations from TAGC on our YouTube channel.

Browse TAGC videos

The videos include audio and slides from each presentation and are freely available to the public. To help you navigate all this genetics, GSA created an easy-to-use website for browsing the videos. You can search for presenters or keywords, and filter by community, theme, and/or session title. Abstracts are also linked to each video, to give you easy access to further details, including author names and affiliations.

Read the TAGC meeting report

The report in G3 includes highlights from each community meeting, contributed by the program committees, plus comprehensive summaries of a selection of joint plenary and other keynote sessions. We are grateful for the hard work of the organizers and presenters in putting together this important record of the meeting.

We hope you enjoy exploring and sharing these new resources!

If you have any questions, or if you believe your video has been incorrectly included or omitted, please contact Cristy Gelling: cgelling@thegsajournals.org.

Guest post by Mathieu Hénault. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

Most traits are controlled by more than one gene, and interactions between the effects of genes (GxG) can modify phenotypes in a non-additive manner; this phenomenon is called epistasis. Results presented by David M. Rand at The Allied Genetics Conference support the idea that phenotypes may be under an even more complex control: GxG interactions can depend on the environment (E), giving rise to higher-order GxGxE interactions.

Rand’s team looked at GxG interactions between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes (mitonuclear interactions). Defects in these interactions are known to cause many human diseases. The team engineered a panel of Drosophila fruit flies that have mitochondria from foreign strains, creating new combinations of previously unmatched nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. They grew these strains on four different types of food and observed extensive phenotypic variation among mitonuclear genotype combinations (GXG), notably in development time. In some cases, time required for pupae eclosion for a particular mitonuclear genotype varied strikingly with the diet of the flies, revealing the presence of GxGxE interactions.

This study suggests that, for a gene to produce a phenotype, the challenge of interacting with different environments may be as great as the challenge of interacting with related genes. This layer of interactions goes beyond the complexity introduced by epistasis and makes the course of evolution harder to predict. The results also suggest the success of mitochondrial replacement therapies will likely depend on interactions between source mitochondrial genotypes and recipient’s nuclear genotypes, which may themselves depend on the environment experienced by each individual.

TAGC Program Number P396

Can epistasis or GxE be predictable? Lessons from mitonuclear interactions in Drosophila.

D.M. Rand, J. A. Mossman, L. A. Biancani, C.-T. Zhu. Brown Univ, Providence, RI.

Article : http://www.genetics.org/content/203/1/463

Mathieu Hénault

About the author:

Mathieu is an undergraduate student in Dr Christian R. Landry’s lab at Université Laval (Quebec City, Canada). His research interests are mitonuclear interactions and microbial speciation. http://landrylab.ibis.ulaval.ca/

Guest post by Caroline Berger. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

You might remember the flickering cilia of little Paramecia  from the classroom, where these ciliate species can be easily observed with a binocular microscope. Historically, Paramecium has been used to study processes such as mating-type inheritance and phagocytosis. However, thanks to the emergence of new genetic tools, the genome of Paramecium is now under the microscope.

Sequencing the genomes of several members of the Paramecium aurelia complex, a group of 15 species, revealed that these ciliates encode 40,000 protein-coding genes—that’s twice as many as humans! This abundance of genes is the result of three Whole-Genome Duplications (WGD). Although this kind of duplication is common in eukaryotes, most of the duplicates are thought to eventually be lost through the accumulation of mutations that destroy function.

Results presented at The Allied Genetics Conference reveal that in some cases, Paramecium has retained both genes in a duplicate pair for long stretches of evolutionary time. What evolutionary forces could have prevented duplicated gene loss? In his talk, Jean-Francois Gout (Indiana University) proposed a model based on dosage constraints. Genomic and transcriptomic analysis of three P. aurelia species demonstrated that both copies are retained as long as they maintain constant total expression levels (summed over the duplicates). The first step towards gene loss would be expression level divergence: once a threshold of imbalance is reached, the copy with the lowest expression can be lost because its deletion will not impact the total amount of proteins produced. Similar results in yeast species confirmed these conclusions: the fate of many duplicated genes is a random walk along the line of conserved total expression level. This study also highlights the importance of ciliates; from classrooms to the lab, these emergent model organisms allow us to better understand the forces driving genome evolution.

TAGC Program Number C13

Maintenance and loss of duplicated genes by dosage subfunctionalization in Paramecium.

Jean-Francois Pierre Gout
Indiana University
Article: http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/8/2141

Caroline Berger

About the author: Caroline Berger is a PhD student at Université Laval, Québec, interested in the evolution of protein interactions. She loves writing – from science news to short stories. Twitter: @BergerCaroline5

Guest post by Deepika Vasudevan. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

The microbes in our guts seem to affect almost every aspect of human health, from the obvious (e.g. metabolism¹) to the unexpected (e.g. behavior²). Several of these paradigms have stemmed from studies in model organisms that have been later validated in humans. This year, The Allied Genetics Conference featured a workshop on the gut microbiota of the fruit fly, Drosophila. One interesting study presented in the session revealed that the gut microbiota alters host alcohol metabolism and sensitivity.

Results presented by Malachi Blundon, a graduate student in the McCartney and Minden laboratories at Carnegie Mellon University, showed that “germ-free” flies, which lack a microbiota, have decreased sensitivity and increased tolerance to alcohol. Alcohol sensitivity and tolerance in humans and Drosophila is controlled in part by the enzyme Alcohol Dehydrogenase (ADH), which metabolizes potentially harmful alcohols into useful aldehydes. Human ADH mutations, commonly found in Eastern Asian populations, decrease both alcohol tolerance and the risk of dependence. Furthermore, people with alcoholism have been reported to have an altered microbiota. The causal relationship between this “dysbiosis” and alcoholism is unknown.

Blundon and his colleagues found that germ-free flies have a higher level of ADH in their heads compared to control flies. Without their gut microbiota, the flies remained mobile significantly longer after exposure to ethanol vapor, and were less likely to die after repeated alcohol exposure. When germ-free flies had their microbiome restored, their ethanol sensitivity returned to levels similar to the control group. Ongoing studies in their lab include examining whether the microbiota also affects alcohol preference in Drosophila and identifying the specific microbe that mediates the alcohol response.

Blundon hopes these studies will provide insight into the possible roles that the microbiota have on alcohol metabolism and alcohol abuse disorders.

Drosophila gut stained for Lactobacillus brevis (magenta) using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH), and for gut cell nuclei (blue). A type of simple alcohol exposure chamber can be used to test for alcohol sensitivity and tolerance in Drosophila. Images courtesy of Scott Keith and Malachi Blundon, McCartney Lab, Carnegie Mellon University.

TAGC Workshop: Drosophila Microbiota
Organizers: Brooke McCartney, Carnegie Mellon University; and Will Ludington, University of California, Berkeley
The microbiota affects ADH protein level and influences alcohol sensitivity in Drosophila
Malachi Blundon, Carnegie Mellon University, McCartney Lab

CITATIONS

1. Mikkelsen, K. H., Allin, K. H. & Knop, F. K. Effect of antibiotics on gut microbiota, glucose metabolism and body weight regulation: a review of the literature. Diabetes Obes Metab 18, 444–453 (2016).
2. Dinan, T. G. & Cryan, J. F. Microbes, Immunity, and Behavior: Psychoneuroimmunology Meets the Microbiome. Neuropsychopharmacology (2016). doi:10.1038/npp.2016.103

Deepika

About the author: Deepika Vasudevan is a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Medical Center who uses Drosophila to understand the effects of physiological stress on innate immunity, lifespan, and more. Follow her stream of scientific consciousness on Twitter @dvasudevan.

The Genetics Society of America is pleased to announce the winners of the GSA Poster Awards at The Allied Genetics Conference! Current undergraduate and graduate student GSA members were eligible for the Awards; six research communities participated in the competition, with postdoctoral scholars volunteering their time and efforts as judges.

The Herculean effort of organizing the 84 postdoctoral judges was spearheaded by the GSA Poster Judging Committee Chair, Peter Stirling, a scientist at the British Columbia Cancer Agency and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. Peter was assisted by: TAGC Trainee Organizing Committee Chair, Kathleen Dumas, a postdoc at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging; Robin Leigh Armstrong, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and GSA staff members Anne Marie Mahoney and Beth Ruedi.

C. elegans Development, Cell Biology, and Gene Expression Topic Meeting

Graduate Students

1st Place: Kimberly Gauthier, MUHC Research Institute, McGill University
2nd Place: Cristina Matthewman, University of Miami Miller College of Medicine
3rd Place: Amel Alqadah, University of Illinois at Chicago

Undergraduate Students

1st Place: James Brandt, Lewis & Clark College
2nd Place: Maegan Neilson, College of the Holy Cross

Ciliate Molecular Biology Conference

Graduate Student

Miguel Gonzales, Texas A&M

Undergraduate Student

Evan Wilson, Missouri State University

57th Annual Drosophila Research Conference

Graduate Students

1st Place: Daniel Kelpsch, University of Iowa
2nd Place: Afsoon Saadin, University of Maryland Baltimore County
3rd Place: Sumaira Zamurrad, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Undergraduate Students

1st Place: Niahz Wince, Pennsylvania State University, Berks College
2nd Place: Phuong Nguyen, Drexel University

2016 Mouse Genetics Conference

Graduate Students

1st Place: Meng Zhang, Yale University
2nd Place: Sarah Bay, Emory University

Undergraduate Students

Andreea Radulescu, University of Surrey, Great Britain

Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics

Graduate Students

1st Place: Thom Nelson, University of Oregon
2nd Place: Michelle Parmenter, University of Wisconsin–Madison
3rd Place: April Peterson, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Undergraduate Student

Mathieu Henault, IBIS, Université Laval, Canada

Yeast Genetics Meeting

Graduate Students

1st Place: Dara Lo, University of Toronto, Canada
2nd Place (TIE!): Jon Laurent, University of Texas at Austin & Yu-San Yang, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Undergraduate Student

Alex Lederer, University of Pittsburgh

A press release with more information about each of the winners will be available soon.

Guest post by Christian R. Landry. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

When building new phenotypes, evolution often draws on mutations of the intricate mechanisms that regulate gene expression. If such regulatory mutations are  associated with the affected genes themselves, they are known as cis regulatory mutations; if the mutations are associated with other genes they are said to act in trans. One trick that researchers have used to differentiate these two effects is to create F1 hybrids between their strains of interest, in which they can follow the expression of two alleles independently. Unequal expression of the two alleles reveals the influence of cis acting mutations. Most studies so far have measured mRNA abundance at steady state and have shown that mutations affecting how much mRNA is present are frequent within and between species. However, survival in a changing environment may depend less on the amount of mRNA produced and more on the time it takes to produce it.  But until recently it was largely unknown whether cis acting mutations also affect the timing of gene expression. Ching-Huah Shih, a postdoctoral fellow working with Justin Fay at Washington University, is exploiting the hybrid approach to learn whether cis regulatory variation that affects the dynamics of induction occurs in budding yeast populations and species.

To do so, he measures genome-wide mRNA abundance along a time-course of gene expression induction in hybrids. In a talk presented at the workshop on yeast diversity of the GSA Yeast Genetics Meeting, Ching-Hua showed that cis regulatory variation affecting induction dynamics is as abundant as variation affecting steady-state levels. One major question that emerges from this observation is whether dynamics and steady state levels can be optimized independently from each other by natural selection. Ching-Hua provided a partial yet key answer to this question by showing that species differences in steady-state levels are significantly associated with nucleotide substitutions in the promoter regions, whereas the dynamics are associated with insertions and deletions. Yeast promoter regions are rich in simple sequence repeats that evolve fast by gaining and losing repeat units. Natural selection may thus have plenty of variation to play with to fine-tune gene expression dynamics. One important challenge ahead will be to examine whether natural selection prefers tuning gene expression timing rather than abundance.   

P2068B Cis-acting variation in gene expression dynamics within and between Saccharomyces species. Ching-Hua Shih.

TAGC16 Workshop: Beyond cerevisiae: Exploiting yeast diversity in nature to understand genome evolution in diverse environments Organizers: Christian Landry, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada, and Judith Berman, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

About the author: Christian R. Landry, Université Laval. Christian is doing research in evolutionary systems biology. You can follow him on twitter: @landrychristian and follow the work of his team at http://landrylab.ibis.ulaval.ca/

The recent Brexit vote may initiate a break up of the European Union and a split in the United Kingdom. Violence and war is tearing apart the Middle East. Racial tensions are flaring up in the U.S. But in Florida two weeks ago, 3,000 model organism geneticists proved that separate communities not only can co-exist but can join together to exchange hard-won wisdoms and forge new collaborations.

Now, you may think it fatuous of me to compare two soldiers on opposite sides of a sectarian battle to two grad students training in such polarized and bellicose environments as a worm lab and a fly lab. But much human behavior derives from our sense of who is part of an in-group vs. an out-group, and our consequent activities to protect those we include among our close kin. This insularity extends even to science. So when members of seven different model system communities came to the GSA-sponsored TAGC meeting to roam the vast halls of a conference center cooled to hibernation-inducing temperature, they provided a lesson in cooperativity that politicians and ordinary citizens could learn from.

TAGC featured the best our field has to offer. We saw blood stem cells cuddled by endothelial cells and body slammed by macrophages; we watched sleep-deprived fruitflies struggling to mate; we learned evolutionary principles that drive new structures in stickleback fish; we came to appreciate that differences between microbiomes could help explain healthy vs. unhealthy outcomes in newborns with limited access to food; and we marveled at the synthesis of complete yeast chromosomes missing their tRNAs and transposons but gaining a bunch of recombination sites in compensation.

In recent years the GSA has sponsored meetings for the individual model organism communities. Each has it own myriad preferences, such as when to hold the meeting; what type of venue to use; how many sessions to include; when to have the poster sessions; and how to integrate the workshops into the program. Thus, a combined meeting like TAGC takes a lot of heavy lifting to arrive at a series of compromises acceptable to everyone. Because even the plenary talks – a highlight of the meeting – take away from the time available for community-specific events, deciding the number and content of the plenary sessions can be the United Nations-lite. But TAGC was not a zero sum game: every community ended up a winner.

Another example of how combined community support had impact far greater than any single community could muster centers on the Model Organism Databases. The NIH has advanced a plan to integrate several of these into a single database, accompanied by a 30% reduction in funding for each. While the idea to integrate is sensible, necessary and long overdue, concerns have arisen as to whether essential organism-specific information would be maintained as the integration moved forward.

A statement of support initiated by the Drosophila community, spearheaded by David Bilder at Berkeley, quickly drew other model organism leaders to come together to draft a final version. The GSA hosted the statement and collected signatures. In short order, it had support from 12 Nobel laureates, 60 members of the National Academy of Sciences and more than 11,000 signers from 85 countries around the world.

The statement did not go unnoticed. NIH director Francis Collins mentioned it in his talk at TAGC and met with a group of community and database leaders at the conference. A meeting at the NIH to refine the database proposal is in the works for later this year. The statement has helped ensure that the model organism communities will weigh in on the process.

The GSA is a relatively small organization, but we have a passionate membership that includes many grad students, postdocs and faculty dedicated to the Society. We rely on their energy and volunteer spirit to make sure that initiatives like TAGC and the database statement of support are successful. In a time when our political discourse often features pronouncements of divisiveness and exclusion, when significance is measured by the number of one’s Twitter followers, and when public figures a few basepairs short of a full helix may seem predominant, it’s good to see geneticists acting as a unified group.

Guest post by Tyler Kent. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

Purging harmful mutations is the most common task of natural selection. In non-recombining populations this background selection process represents the “survival of the fittest” in action, but this genetic housekeeping also lowers a population’s genetic diversity. While traditional methods for modeling background selection typically assume that all harmful mutations have the same effect on fitness and undergo the same strength of selection, a new method presented at The Allied Genetics Conference aims to more accurately understand this process and its effects.

By considering the total fitness cost of harmful mutations in an individual, Ivana Cvijović (Harvard University) showed she can infer whether individuals in a sample were recent ancestors of each other or instead came from more distant historic lineages. When considering an individual’s fitness cost, its ancestor would have had a higher fitness that can be found by incorporating both the costs of all possible mutations and the chance of finding an ancestor at the correct fitness level. The inferred lineage structure can then reveal when an individual in the past had accumulated too many harmful mutations—a bubble of fitness cost which burst when it had become too unfit to survive.

When extended back in time, this bubble coalescent method can reconstruct the genealogy of populations that have experienced background selection of varying strengths and can accurately estimate their current diversity. Cvijović hopes that her method will help us to understand more of the nuances of background selection, many of which are lost using current methods.

The inference of fitness states of an individual’s ancestors, and the genealogy that results. Courtesy Ivana Cvijovic.

TAGC Program Number P367:
The genetic diversity of a population experiencing selection.
Ivana Cvijovic; Benjamin Good; Michael Desai
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

About the author: Tyler Kent is a graduate student in the Wright Lab at the University of Toronto studying the evolution of genetic load. Follow him on twitter at @tylervkent.

Guest post by the Alliance of Genome Resources.

If you want to help the Alliance please take a short survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GSA-AllianceSurvey

Six of the founding members of the Alliance of Genome Resources (Saccharomyces Genome Database, WormBase, FlyBase, Zebrafish Model Organism Database, Mouse Genome Database and the Gene Ontology Consortium) attended GSA’s The Allied Genetics Conference in Orlando from July 13-17. It was a great opportunity for these individual resources to talk about their new collaboration to integrate their content and software into a single resource that benefits biologists, educators, and clinicians alike.

The model organism databases have a long history of reaching out to their respective communities for feedback on new developments and input on future directions. Carrying on this tradition, the Alliance has created a short survey to obtain feedback on how best to provide human disease information in relation to model organisms. In addition, the Alliance is asking for input on the prioritization of website visualizations, tools and data type curation.

Thank you for continued support!