HGNC Now at EBI

We are pleased to report that the HGNC team are now well and truly settled into our new home at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, near Cambridge, UK. As some of you have probably noticed, unfortunately our old server at UCL is now offline, but all the facilities of the old website have been retained and continue to be updated at www.genenames.org. If you have any out of date links we ask that you update these as soon as possible; if you need to update a large number of links please let us know as we may be able to help. Also, if you spot any websites with dead links to our old website please either let us know (via email to hgnc@genenames.org) or ask them to update directly.

Thanks to our funding from the Wellcome Trust and the NHGRI, we will be advertising very soon for two new gene nomenclature advisors to join the HGNC team. The adverts should be online in January and will be linked from our homepage, so please bring these positions to the attention of any colleagues you feel might be interested in joining us at the EBI.

Locus-Specific Databases

We have recently added links to locus-specific databases (LSDBs) from our gene symbol reports; LSDBs contain curated lists of mutations in specific genes. The full list of LSDBs can be found on the Human Genome Variation Society (HGVS) website at http://www.hgvs.org/dblist/glsdb, and we thank the HGVS for creating and maintaing this list. If you know of any other LSDBs we could link to please email us.

HCOP Update

The HGNC Comparison of Orthology Predictions search tool, HCOP, has recently been updated to enable users to compare orthologs predicted for human genes in 7 other genomes (chimp, mouse, rat, dog, chicken, zebrafish and fruitfly). We have also added a further orthology dataset to HCOP, from the OMA Browser (http://omabrowser.org/, PMID 17545180), making a total of 10 independent orthology datasets available for comparison in HCOP.

Meetings Attended

Elspeth and Matt attended the 21st International Mammalian Genome Conference held in Kyoto, Japan from 28th October to 1st November, where they presented a poster on gene nomenclature across species entitled "If we could talk to the animals". They also met with Lois Maltais and Janan Eppig of MGI to discuss human and mouse gene nomenclature issues, and attended the International Committee on Standardized Nomenclature for Mice annual meeting.

Sue was also kind enough to present our "If we could talk to the animals" poster for us at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in San Diego (23-27 October).

Ubiquitin-like Modifier Activating Enzymes (UBA)

We recently contacted the ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes research community to canvas opinion on a new unified and systematic nomenclature for the E1 genes. As these genes were historically known as UB activators (UBA#) and this nomenclature was already being used in publications, it was proposed that they change to the unified UBA# stem symbol for 'ubiquitin-like modifier activating enzyme #'. This was agreed, with the one exception being the MOCS3 gene which has been extensively published in the literature; this symbol has been retained with UBA4 listed as an alias. The complete family can be found at http://www.genenames.org/genefamily/uba.php

Connexin/Gap Junction Gene Family Nomenclature

We are pleased to announce that the new gene family nomenclature has been approved, in accordance with the results of the voting at the International Gap Junction Conference 2007 Nomenclature Discussion in Elsinore, Denmark. The new gene symbols and names can be found at http://www.genenames.org/genefamily/gj.php.

Publications

Bruford EA, Lush MJ, Wright MW, Sneddon TP, Povey S, Birney E. The HGNC Database in 2008: a resource for the human genome.. Nucleic Acids Res. 2007 Nov 4 [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 17984084