The new guidelines were proposed and discussed by fourteen participants at the ASHG01 Nomenclature Workshop.  We have also received feedback from a number of our advisors and users including Drs Mark Paalman, Marie-Paule Lefranc, Dan Nebert, Dallas Swallow, Tom Shows, Gerard Manning, Jerzy Jurka, Dick Cotton, Antoine Vekris and Steve Marsh.  Accordingly the draft human guidelines have now been updated.

Areas that have been changed include the nomenclature for antisense genes, pseudogenes and orthologous genes.

New Server

The new UNIX server is now online.  However, there have been a few teething problems with the FTP site.  Please let us know (hgnc@genenames.org) if you are still experiencing difficulties with FTP.

HGNC Personnel

We have a new editorial assistant Patrice Ajai-Ajagbe who is involved in data collection and curation. Dr Elspeth Bruford has joined the Human Genome Annotation Committee (HGAC) to advise on nomenclature use in annotation.
 

Dr Sue Povey and Dr Hester Wain visited the Sanger centre in September to give a presentation and discuss the draft guidelines.  A number of the Sanger's suggestions were incorporated into the September 17 update, available online.

We again had a stand at 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, in San Diego and displayed a poster "Nomenclature: The language of Genomics".  Copies of the draft guidelines were available and we spoke to a number of people at the stand, thank you for visiting.  We also would like to thank GDB for providing use of their Internet connection. 

We once again spent time during the conference verifying nomenclature usage on the posters; however 23% (604/2653) were missing this year.  We shall be contacting the authors of 160 posters, via the ASHG committee, about inaccurate use of gene symbols, or to assign symbols to new genes. 

Gene Families

centaurins

We are currently investigating the TAF2 "TATA box binding protein (TBP)-associated factor, RNA polymerase II" gene family symbols and be proposing a new system of nomenclature.  Please contact us for further information.