Issue 18 - July 2012

Editor - Varsha Khodiyar

Gene annotation

Based on the EBI statistics, 9th June 2012, this project has associated over 25,500 GO terms to 3,500 proteins, 17,800 of which are to 2,080 human proteins. Ruth has started annotating key genes involved in cardiac conduction processes, including SCN5A, SCN1B, SCN2B, SCN3B, SCN4B and ANK3.  She is focusing on the role of these genes in cardiac conduction, but is not trying to capture the full role of these proteins in other processes, due to the volume of literature describing the human proteins.

Gene Ontology

New GO terms describing cardiac conduction are continuing to be released; with many more still to come. This brings the total number of GO terms created through the focused annotation of cardiovascular-relevant genes to almost 1600.

Community annotation

UCL students and staff annotated 28 papers during our 2-day GO annotation workshop in April, allowing Varsha and Ruth to submit over 200 annotations from these papers to the GOC. One attendee in particular decided to focus on her own publication record and so taking part in the workshop allowed her to annotate and thus promote her own papers. Our thanks go to all attendees for taking part in this workshop.

If you would like to promote your own publications in this way, please note that registration is now open for our fifth GO Annotation Workshop (10-11th September). As always this workshop is freely available to all biological or biomedical PhD and Post-Doc research scientists. The workshop aims to boost attendees' understanding of bioinformatics resources and their use. Please register for the September workshop, or contact us if you are interested in attending a future workshop.

In addition, we are running two curation days for previous attendees of the 2-day GO workshops. The first takes place later this month on 17th July, and we look forward to catching up with some of our previous workshop attendees! The second curation day takes place directly after the September GO workshop, on 12th September, and registration for the September curation day is now open to any previous GO workshop attendees who wish to attend.

Meetings attended

In early June, Ruth attended the Human Variome Project Biennial Meeting, Paris, where the attendees discussed the plans and ideas that will move the project forward and launched the 2012-16 Project Roadmap. Ruth presented a 15 minute talk entitled 'HVP and GO annotation' during the Cardiac Genetics Interest Satellite Group meeting and a poster entitled 'Can HVP GO further? Expanding human Gene Ontology…'.  

At the end of June, Ruth and Varsha attended the UCL Computational Life and Medical Sciences Symposium, presenting a poster entitled 'The impact of focused Gene Ontology annotation efforts on high-throughput data analysis'. This meeting discussed the role of information technology across life and medical sciences.

Upcoming meetings

Varsha will be attending the 12th London Heart Development Meeting at the Institute of Child Health.

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