HGNC is Relocating

The HGNC is moving to the EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute), at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK from 1st September 2007.

Our new website, www.genenames.org, is up and running and we ask that everyone updates their bookmarks immediately to this new address - the old webserver www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/nomenclature will be offline from 29th August. Please also ensure any emails for us are now addressed to hgnc"at"genenames.org. It is likely we will not be able to respond to enquiries in a timely manner over the next month, and so we would be grateful if non-urgent requests could not be sent to us until at least mid September. We thank you in advance for your patience and understanding during this busy time.

Once at the EBI Elspeth Bruford will lead the HGNC as co-principal investigator with Ewan Birney, continuing to work with Matt Wright and Michael Lush; we also have funding from the Wellcome Trust and NHGRI to appoint two new curators in due course.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the past members of the HGNC for their invaluable work over the last 11 years that the HGNC has been based at University College London under the chair of Sue Povey. Sue's pending retirement at the end of this year was the instigation for the HGNC's move from UCL. Sue has made a vital contribution to the success of standardised gene nomenclature and we are pleased to report that she has agreed to play a key role in our International Advisory Committee, to ensure her invaluable input is not lost from the HGNC.

HUGOA Project

Ruth Lovering will be attending the GOC meeting in Princeton in September and is funded to continue the HUGOA project until the end of October 2007. The continuation of a GO annotation group at UCL is dependent on future funding, which is currently being sought. Varsha Khodiyar is now on maternity leave. Any questions about the HUGOA project should be directed to HUGOA"at"ucl.ac.uk.

Meetings Attended

Michael presented a poster entitled "Database Tools for Human Gene Nomenclature and Orthology" at the ISMB/ECCB meeting in Vienna, Austria, 21-25th July.

Elspeth was invited to attend the International Gap Junction Conference 2007 Nomenclature Discussion in Elsinore, Denmark, 4-9th August. At this meeting the decision of 2005 to abandon the sequence-based subdivisions of the family as an element of the gene nomenclature was rescinded by an overwhelming vote (92%). The system that was endorsed preserves the existing HGNC human connexin gene names (GJA1, GJB2, etc.) and currently unassigned genes will be named according to their relationships to the other genes. Some recognized errors in subgroup designation will be corrected, for example the GJA7 gene encoding Cx45 is no longer considered to be an alpha group gene and will therefore receive a new designation.

Where connexin genes in other animals are clearly orthologous with particular human genes, they will assume the human gene names; where they are not orthologous, new names will be assigned that do not duplicate existing names in other species, unless the genes are orthologous. Once the process of defining orthologous relationships is complete, the finalised official gene names will be posted on the respective species gene nomenclature websites.

Publications

Davies KJ, Ermak G, Rothermel BA, Pritchard M, Heitman J, Ahnn J, Henrique-Silva F, Crawford D, Canaider S, Strippoli P, Carinci P, Min KT, Fox DS, Cunningham KW, Bassel-Duby R, Olson EN, Zhang Z, Williams RS, Gerber HP, Pérez-Riba M, Seo H, Cao X, Klee CB, Redondo JM, Maltais LJ, Bruford EA, Povey S, Molkentin JD, McKeon FD, Duh EJ, Crabtree GR, Cyert MS, de la Luna S and Estivill X. Renaming the DSCR1/Adapt78 gene family as RCAN: regulators of calcineurin. FASEB J. 2007 Jun 26; [Epub ahead of print]. PMID:17595344.