Dear All,
3 pieces of news:
(1) I have been contacted by Saira Mian of the Lawrence Berkely
National Laboratoty in the USA (saira at cse.ucsc.edu) with the offer of
assistance in analysis of schisto genome data and of acting as a
contact point for people with data analysis problems, queries etc.
she writes:
"My research interests include genome informatics, the structure,
function and evolution of macromolecules and processes that subvert
the linear reading of genomic sequences..... see
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/research, in particular the descriptions of
hidden Markov models for modelling proteins and stochastic context
free grammars of RNA. I would be interested in becoming involved in
analysis of Schistosoma DNA...... Apart from the intrinsic scientific
interest, it's one way of contributing to efforts aimed at
understanding an organism that has such devasting consequences for
health in less-well developed countries.........Looking at the figures
for EST hits, it seems as if there is plenty of work to do........ I
would be happy to act a general resource/point of contact for anyone
in the Schisto Network if they have questions or need help with
analysis of their data from a theoretical and/or computational
perspective. My interests lie both in developing new methods and
applying them to problems of specific "biological"
interest. I have a number of fruitful collaborations with researchers
who are primarily experimentalists so I'm familiar with working with
individuals having little or no background in this area. If there are
others who end up expressing interest in analysing the data from the
Schisto project, I would have no objections to collaborating with
them. As you say, there is no lack of data to go round...... If any
projects (developed from the EST data) feel their chances of being
funded would be improved were there a computational component to the
proposal and would thus benefit from including me, let me know.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
saira"
Saira is keen to receive ideas as to the sorts of analyses you wish to
see done on your data, your priorities etc. so please feel free to
contact her with your suggestions. This is a very generous offer and
one which, I am sure, will bring significant benefits to the
initiative so please take advantage of it and talk with her.
------------------------------------------------------------------
(2) I am shortly to begin updating the schisto EST records in DBEST to
reflect the agreed new clone/EST nomenclature. Your original clone and
sequence IDs will be preserved as comment lines in the records.
Submitters are therfore likely to receive mail from NCBI, informing
them of the proposed changes and asking for their approval for the
changes (since I didn't submit them, it is their policy to check with
the original submitters). We are withholding release of version 1 of
SchistoDB until the records have been updated. I will keep you
informed of progress.
-------------------------------------------------------------
(3) Hopefully, people will hear from WHO in the next week or so
whether their applications have been successful or not (but its no
good writing to Mette or I because we don't know anything).
With best wishes to everyone,
David.
DAJ
David A Johnston
Researcher, Biomedical Parasitology, Dept. of Zoology,
The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD.
tel: 0171 9389297 (from outside UK: 44 171 9389297)
fax: 0171 9388754 (from outside UK: 44 171 9388754)
eMail daj at nhm.ac.uk
