Worm Breeder's Gazette 12(5): 11 (February 1, 1993)
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
It would be useful if worm labs had access to each other's strain
lists. For instance, one lab may have put away in the freezer as
uninteresting a mutation that is just what a second lab wants.
Unfortunately, there have always been practical difficulties to
sharing strain lists: they change frequently, and there is no common
format.
A new network program called Gopher (see contribution from Mike
Cherry on previous page of this WBG issue, which discusses the use
of Gopher in connection with accessing the ACEDB database) may be
the solution to these problems. Gopher sends an inquiry over the
Internet directly to the source, without the user having to know
about any messy details. The reply is current, and comes back as
text, so that format problems don't arise. Other kinds of information
(e.g., pictures) can also be made available.
To test the feasibility of Gopher for data sharing, we have set up
Gopher service at the CGC (elegans.cbs.umn.edu; IP address
134.84.210.1) and the Avery lab (eatworms.swmed utexas.edu; IP
address 129.112.11.21). By gopher to either of these addresses you
can get the CGC bibliography, strain list, WBG subscriber directory,
recent WBG tables of contents, Avery lab strain lists, pictures of
mutants, manuscripts in press, and (thanks to Mike Cherry at
Massachusetts General Hospital) access to ACEDB information.
Gopher is available for Macintosh, IBM-PC, Unix, and Xwindows by
anonymous ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu (134.84.132.2). If you
don't know how to get it, send e-mail to
leon@eatworms.swmed.utexas.edu and we will try to help. Also, we
would like to urge other labs to make data available by Gopher. If you
do, send us e-mail so you can be included in the CGC menu. If you
would like to make your strain lists available but don't know how,
send e-mail and we'll see if we can help with that.