[Pombelist] The fission yeast model organism database, an update

[val at sanger.ac.uk]

Dear colleagues,


      As many of you will be aware we have submitted an application to
      the Wellcome Trust in July which will be reviewed in February
      2010. This is a joint proposal between Jurg Bahler (University
      College London) Stephen Oliver (University of Cambridge) , Paul
      Kersey and Ewan Birney (European Bioinformatics Institute), and
      myself. We aim to provide the database, curation tools and
      curators required to support fission yeast in its increasing
      capacity as an exemplar model organism.

      We have requested funding to provide:
      (i) Comprehensive, deep curation of the scientific literature;
      through the launch of a new community curation initiative  and
      the employment of 2 additional curators to clear the existing
      literature backlog.
      (ii) A software infrastructure to support curation activities.
      (iii) A computational infrastructure to integrate and display the
      curated data, high-throughput data, and data from other fungal
      genomes using the Ensembl software platform for genome analysis
      and display. The recent integration of fission yeast in Ensembl
      Fungi (http://fungi.ensembl.org <http://fungi.ensembl.org/>)
      provides a prototype for this part of the proposal; but will be
      extended to provide better support for literature-curated data,
      and the specific high throughput datasets (for example
      transcriptome, variation, proteomics, synteny views) will be
      integrated.

      A new dedicated portal for fission yeast data (branded “PomBase”)
      will provide the primary point of communoity access to this data.

      Many thanks to those of you who have already provided support for
      this proposal in various ways, through letters of support or
      participation in the community curation pilot project. I also
      apologize for the current curation backlog, which it is impossible
      to clear with current resources and thank you for your continued
      patience and support. We hope that this will finally provide
      fission yeast with the resources to systematically tackle the
      curation backlog, and provide a comprehensively curated and
      sustainable community database. Hopefully we will have good news
      in February........