Newsletter

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Issue 21 - April 2013

Editor - Ruth Lovering

Grant Success

We are pleased to announce that our annotation programme grant application, to the British Heart Foundation, has been successful. The grant application has extended the remit of the previous application, so that although we are still focused on cardiovascular relevant genes, we will be creating both protein and microRNA annotations, using Gene Ontology, as well as capturing protein-protein interactions. To reflect this change the project name has changed, see above. In addition, the grant was submitted with Ruth Lovering as PI and two new co-applicants, Steve Humphries and Manuel Mayr. Ruth has been the co-ordinator for the project for the past five years, and her salary will be funded by UCL. Steve Humphries research interests include the molecular causes of Familial Hypercholesterolemia, as well as genome wide analysis of cardiovascular traits. Manuel Mayr is based at King's College London and has active microRNA and proteomic research projects. Philippa Talmud and Rolf Apweiler continue as co-applicants. We are very grateful to Pete Scambler and Mike Hubank for their contributions as co-applicants on the previous grant.

We are now looking to recruit two new biocurators, and would be grateful if this newsletter could be circulated to anyone with a strong cardiovascular research background who might be interested in leaving the bench and contributing to this annotation project. Visit the UCL jobs website for more information about these posts, and search the current employment opportunities at UCL with the word ‘biocurator’, or look at the individual posts, Biocurator and Senior Biocurator.

Gene annotation

Based on the EBI statistics, 2nd March 2013, this project has associated 28,555 GO terms to 3,900 proteins, 19,500 of which are to 2,200 human proteins. Since January Ruth has focused on the annotation of cardiac conduction proteins and proteins associated with early heart development.

Community engagement

Registration is now open for our sixth GO Annotation Workshop (18-19th April 2013), there maybe a few places left and non-UCL scientists are welcome. This two-day course provides hands-on training in the use of GO, as well as other bioinformatics resources, such as UniProt, Ensembl, Biomart, IntAct, Cytoscape and a selection of functional analysis tools. As always this workshop is freely available to all biological or biomedical PhD and Post-Doc research scientists. Please contact us if you are interested in attending.

We have also organised for the EBI roadshow to provide training at UCL in May. This event is proving to be very popular and the ENCODE and RNA-Seq analysis days were sold out within 2 days. However, there are still a few places available for the Interaction and Network Analysis training day, please register if you would like to attend, cost £25 to cover trainers costs and refreshments each day.

Upcoming meetings

In April Ruth will be attending the International Society for Biocuration meeting and the GO Consortium meeting, both of which are being held in Cambridge. In addition, Ruth will also be attending the Innovations in Cardiovascular Science Symposium at the UCL Institute of Child Health.

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