HGNC will be represented in the forthcoming 10th International Congress of Human Genetics in Vienna, Austria May 15 - 19, 2001 (http://www.ichg2001.org/).  Drs. Mathew Wright and Elspeth Bruford will be presenting a poster and can also be found at the  "Nomenclature Stand" (No. 904, blue level) where everyone is welcome to come and discuss any gene nomenclature issues. 

Specialist Advisors
We often need advice from experts in particular areas of biology, especially when new genes are cloned and their exact relationship with established families is unclear to us.  We currently have over 37 advisors, but always need more. 

Therefore, we would like to ask if anyone else would be able to assist us?  As a specialist advisor your contact details would be made available from our homepage and we would consult you, usually fairly infrequently, but often in a confidential manner about specific gene symbols. However we always obtain explicit approval from the person requesting a symbol before releasing any confidential information 
to one of our advisors, since occasionally there may be a conflict of interest. 

There are two important requirements for our specialist advisors. You must respond rapidly to email and your suggestions must conform with our published guidelines and approved gene family symbols. 

The Specialist Advisors list includes some of those who already advise the committee, and recommend appropriate new gene symbols.

Priya Shetty has also joined us as a part time database editorial assistant and she has been responsible for editing this issue of the Nome News.

HGM2001 Nomenclature Workshop
Thank you to all those (approximately 25) who attended the nomenclature workshop held prior to HGM2001 meeting. A full report on this workshop will be published online shortly.   The issue of HGNC ID numbers and their relationship to approved symbols was raised, details of the exact relationships were described in the last Nome News.  We are currently reconsidering these relationships

LBlast
We have now finished our in-house BLAST database termed "lblast".  This was developed by Dr Michael Lush to include data from the variety of sources kept by HGNC e.g. chromosome specific sequence, sequence from Genew3 and sequence from archived text files.  This has proved most useful and has been enhanced with the addition of the downloadable RefSeq sequences.

Genomic Annotation
We have started to look at ways of tackling the whole genome sequence.  To this end, we are in collaboration with both NCBI and Ensembl http://www.ensembl.org/.  We already edit a private NCBI database (NomeMIM) containing novel, as yet unnamed genes, whose data is exported directly into Locuslink http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/LocusLink/.  Working with Ensembl, we are also helping to provide quality control for their gene identification.  In the future we hope to use their Interpro-derived gene family information to assist in assigning new gene symbols.