Well, folks, thank you for your patience, but most of all, thank you for your
enthusiasm and the time you took to respond to my poll. As I may have
mentioned to some of you, in a week, I got responses from 15 people from all
over the world (as you can see since this is a mass mailing).
On Monday, I summarized all the responses and grouped them into about three
categories and sent them off to Rich Walko, who works for Pharmacia and CC'd
a copy to the director of the core facility here in my department:
1. Those who have either ALF or ABI sequencers and expressed interest, but
didn't have any comments or questions. (I wasn't expecting any since I
was only asking if people were interested.)
2. Those who have either ALF or ABI sequencers and expressed interest, and
went one step further and actually sent questions or comments about po-
tential topics of discussion. [I have included them below to hopefully
spark some discussion.]
3. Others, those who are considering ALFs, or didn't specify whether they
had a sequencer or not.
4. I also received some extremely helpful messages from Bruce Roe, the
co-founder of the bionet.genome.chromosomes group. His support and
cautionary (and encouraging) words were much appreciated.
As I mentioned above, I sent the messages on to Rich at pharmacia on Monday
and he responded by saying that they were going to talk about this at a
(A copy of Rich's response is included below, indicated by >).
meeting and that he'll get back to me. Since I haven't heard back from him
and I mentioned to several of you that I would post something this week, here
it is. I'll post something again after I hear from Rich. Now, as I under-
stand it, this group is UNMODERATED, so please reinforce my faith in the in-
ternet scientific community and keep discussions somewhat focussed, but most
importantly, polite and respectful.
Don't get me wrong, please go off on tangents, that's what this is all about,
but let's not sell cars or stereo equipment in this group, good deal on
reagents, that's okay, but no electric breadmakers 8^). This reminds me,
someone suggested that this discussion could take place in the newsgroup
bionet.molbio.methds-reagnts. As I responded below with my annotation to Rich,
I feel this group is too high traffic and that Bruce Roe really laid a
wonderful foundation with the bionet.genome.chromosomes group, but that I will
cross-post the introductory remarks to that group as well as bionet.announce.
Just a point of clarification. I'm not posting this message you're reading,
because I want to get some response from pharmacia before I do that.
So, with that, Thanks again for your participation and I hope this endeavor
proves to merit the attention it has received.
Sincerely,
Jackson Shea
catalytic agent
(by the way, it's Mr., not Dr.; but thanks for giving me the benefit of the
doubt.)
---------------------------------
Oregon Health Sciences University Voice: (503)494-2444
Molecular Microbiology & Immunology Fax: (503)494-6862
Mail Code L220 inet: sheaj at ohsu.edu
Portland, Oregon 97201-3098 USA or jshea at lclark.edu
>Message from Rich Walko
>From: !RichWalko at aol.com>Date: Mon Sep 26 21:15:28 EDT 94
>Subject: Copies of responses
>To: !sheaj at ohsu.EDU>Content-Type: text
>Content-Length: 414
>>Jackson, Thanks much for forwarding the responses from the bionet....
>We are meeting in Pharmacia this week and I will be bringing up the new
>newsgroup and see how we can work this to keep it organized. I'll be back to
>you in a few days.
>> Best wishes,
>> Rich Walko
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Group 2:
THE FOLLOWING 4 COMMENTS ARE FROM RESPONDENTS WHO HAVE ALF OR ABI SEQUENCERS
AND ARE INTERESTED IN THE GROUP, AND HAVE SPECIFIC QUESTIONS/COMMENTS.
==================================================
1.
From: !nivil at gengenp.rug.ac.be (Nino Villarroel)
Date: Sat Sep 17 13:49:00 +0100 94
Subject: Re: Pharmacia ALF Sequencer
Cc: !nivil at gengenp.rug.ac.be
Cc: !jagie at gengenp.rug.ac.be
We have one ALF DNA SEQUENCER and also the 373A from ABI.
I would suggest one more general group like AUTOMATIC DNA SEQUENCERS and we
could include also the other machines in the market like LYCOR, VISTRA,
MILLIPORE, etc.
Raimundo Villarroel
Lab of Genetics
University of Ghent
Belgium
---------
2.
From: !lwashing at sunflower.bio.indiana.edu (Lawrence Washington)
Date: Mon Sep 19 16:02:49 -0500 1994
Subject: Re: Pharmacia ALF Sequencer
References: <35dbr7$o2s at steele.ohsu.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Dear Jackson Shea,
I have a Li-Cor autosequencer, which is, I think, more closely related to
your Pharmacia than to ABI's. I would be interested in following your
discussions even though I might not have a lot to contribute.
By the way, why use genome.chromosomes instead of methds-reagnts? That is
where I usually check for autosequencing postings.
Lawrence Washington
[**NOTE: Incidentally, you might want to check out bionet.molbio.methds-reagnts
but I think it's too high traffic. What I will do, however, is post
messages simultaneously to bionet.genome.programs,
bionet.molbio.methds-reagnts, and bionet.announce when the
introductory message is ready and let people in all those grousp know
that bionet.genome.chromosome will now be the place to discuss the ALF
sequencer and related issues. Jackson]
---------
3.
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 94 22:09:01 CDT
From: Mary Irene Coolbaugh <maryic at imgen.bcm.tmc.edu>
To: jshea at lclark.edu
Subject: ALF newsgroup
Hello Mr/Dr. J. Shea,
We too have an ALF sequencer. Casey Chin at Pharmacia told me that some of
the northwest users were putting together a newsgroup, and I finally saw
your notice on bionet.genome.chromosomes.:>
Maybe this'll prompt the folks at Pharmacia to join the rest of us and
get on the Inet....? Essentially, we have our ALF linked/mounted on our
UNIX SYSTEM via DOS-Windows for the networking. The data is dumped onto
the unix drive [great storage] then automatically batched out to fasta and
blast searches---the results are automatically sent to the directory of
the sequences' "owner"....thus not clogging up _my_ mailbox. Anyway, the
Dos link isn't pretty, but since Baylor Unix/Network support refuses to
support OS2 and/or OS2 networking, well, you just do whatcha gotta do....
I'd _really_ like to network through OS2, but I'd need to talk to somebody
who's done it - successfully.
By the way, Casey informed me last week that he's gotten an "off-site"
net account. You can reach him at cchin at crl.com -- he'd be glad to know
this thing is getting off the ground. [I know I am.]
So --- What's your intended purpose for this little forum?
Exchange of protocols, tips, tricks, and traps to watch out for? Computing
assistance -- how to get OS2 to do what _you_ want it to do? Or just general
gritch sessions? Who else is in here? [So much to find out, and so little
time....]
later,
Mary Coolbaugh Murphy
Molecular and Human Genetics
T836
One Baylor Plaza
Houston, TX 77030
Voice: [713]-798-6548
[713]-798-4774
Fax: [713]-798-7383
inet: maryic at bcm.tmc.edu
or maryic at kiwi.bcm.tmc.edu
---------
4.
From: !BROE at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu
Date: Thu Sep 22 10:59 CDT 94
Subject: RE: ALF Poll
Jackson,
I tried something like this for and ABI user group and quite frankly
it was a waste of time. This then led to the creation of biochrom at net.bio.net.
I'd suggest that one of the stated purposes of this news group is to discuss
automated sequencing so it might be best to deal with your suggestion by just
having everyone ask questions to this news group. Doing an e-mail group was
a big pain and really didn't do what it was supposed to.
Cheers.......bruce
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
\ Bruce A. Roe Dept. Chemistry and Biochemistry /
/ BROE at uoknor.edu University of Oklahoma \
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[**NOTE: I think Bruce is making a great point. I think we should
concentrate on just using the newsgroup as opposed to doing a news-
group AND a mailing list as well. Ken should, however keep a pretty
close watch on the group and be sure to save postings that might
have lasting value.
Also, Bruce should receive a great deal of credit for having set up
this newgroup originally and is now kind enough to offer his advice
and participation. I'm emailing a copy of the original charter that
he sent me.]
