| Issue 18. May 2003 |
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| Meetings attended Our new method of checking gene nomenclature via online access to the newly submitted abstracts, followed up by contacting the authors in advance of the Human Genome Meeting (April 27-30 2003, Cancun, Mexico) was successful. A number of authors had updated their symbols from the original abstract submission, most notably those referring to TP53. The winners of this year’s HUGO nomenclature competition for the highest score for correct gene symbols in a poster were Yan-Zhi Du with “Exploring the gene expression regulation networks in chronic myeloid leukemia cells after co-treatment with arsenic trioxide and Imatnib” (poster 295), and John Matese with “SOURCE: a unified resource containing functional annotations, ontologies and gene expression data” (poster 313). Yan-Zhi Du, from The Shanghai Institute of Hematology, has won a year’s subscription to Nature Genetics, and John Matese from Stanford University has won a year’s subscription to Nature Reviews Genetics. Hester attended the Nomenclature Committee of IUBMB (NC-IUBMB) and IUPAC-IUBMB Joint Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature (JCBN) Meeting (May 3-4 2003, Dublin, Ireland), presenting information on the HGNC and the Virtual Gene Nomenclature Workshop. We are now looking at better ways of incorporating and updating enzyme EC numbers in Genew. Matt and Michael presented a poster at the European Human Genetics Conference 2003 (May 3 - 6, 2003, Birmingham, England) and checked the nomenclature in over 900 posters. We were impressed by the widespread use of approved symbols and will be contacting those few authors who used non-approved symbols to advise them of the correct nomenclature. Chromosome 14 For the publication of "The DNA sequence and analysis of human chromosome 14" by Heilig et al. (Nature 2003), we confirmed and approved 1,063 gene symbols out of 1,435 sequences sent to us; 286 of the sequences we will not be naming at present, as they either represent putative or pseudogenes of unknown genes. |
Upcoming meetings Matt will be representing the HGNC team in Australia this June and July, with a talk at the Sixth Annual Bio-Ontologies meeting (28th June) in Brisbane and a poster at the International Congress of Genetics meeting (6-11th July) in Melbourne. Virtual Workshop The Virtual Gene Nomenclature Workshop is still going strong. We have now identified sequence for 23% of the genes listed, and updated the locus type of over 6%. The deadline for workshop completion is 30th June 2003, so now is the time to send those stray sequences in! Gene Families &
Groupings We have radically updated the histone nomenclature system in line
with the publication by Marzluff et al. (Genomics
2002) to ensure consistency with the mouse gene symbols. Thus, we have
updated 72 replication-dependent histone genes with the new approved stem
nomenclature of “HIST*H#^” for “histone *, H#^”, where * is the chromosomal
cluster, # is the histone type and ^ is the gene locus, e.g. HIST1H1A for
histone 1, H1a. Call for HGNC International
Advisory Committee nominations |
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We are a non-profit making body which is jointly funded by the UK Medical Research Council, the US NHGRI grant P41 HG003345 and the Wellcome Trust (UK).