Worm Breeder's Gazette 12(5): 9 (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.
Acedb has been written in collaboration with Richard Durbin to provide better access and a denser meshing of all the information about C.elegans. You are all concerned, because the authors of the data are the genuine authors of the database. Up to now, we only had time to parse the data readily available from the CGC, the EMBL and the Sulston-Waterston mapping and sequencing project. Acedb will of course continue to include these sources and you should keep sending there the relevant data. But much more is known about our dear nematode.
It would clearly be too much work for one person to extract the information from the available literature. However, we believe that if each of you was willing to share this burden and contribute short descriptions of what he knows, everybody would greatly benefit from these efforts.
We want to include phenotypes, descriptions, cloning, transformations, sequences, expression patterns and also your toolboxes like balancers, expression vectors or protocols. The contributions will be split in short notes, signed by their authors. They will extend the present acedb descriptions and be distributed in the following acedb release. Hopefully every other month or so.
To achieve this result in a quick and simple way, we will send some personal questionnaires about those genes or clones we think you may have touched, along the lines of the existing acedb the data into a precanned format. This will at the same time be more accurate and simplify the clerical work. So please feel free to send your own suggestions.
We will check technically the format of the data and may suggest some style changes or spelling rationalisations, for the sake of uniformity and cross-referencing, but the general philosophy is that it is more informative and more accurate to let people contribute directly their personal data and sign them.
We hope to prototype these ideas before the next worm meeting and think that they should prove extremely rewarding to all of us.