Nome News Issue 5
| Issue 5. March 2001 | |
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| Stolen Server Part of our server was stolen on Saturday 10 February. Luckily, they only took the system box (containing no data); but this has resulted in disruption to our website, email and file accessibility. We worked hard to get everything up and running as soon as possible; the email was online by Tuesday 13 Feb, the website by Thursday 15 Feb, and we finally got the online database working on Friday 23 Feb. We are still experiencing problems as we have had to move to a different operating system, so please let us know if anything is not working and we will try to remedy this as soon as possible. Meetings Dr Wain presented "Nomenclature for the Human Genome" at the Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference in San Diego, California, January 13 - 17, 2001. The abstract is available online. Workshop We are holding a nomenclature workshop in Edinburgh as a satellite meeting before HGM 2001, in the morning of 19th April. Participation is open to all; if interested please notify us in advance by email. International Advisory Committee (IAC) We have recently consulted the members of the IAC regarding the confidentiality agreement form that we ask every submitter of a new gene to complete. We updated the original form to include new options regarding sequence data confidentiality, in light of the vast amount of publicly available sequence data. This is in an attempt to avoid the duplication of symbols for a single gene wherever possible No serious objections were raised and the new confidentiality form is available. |
Human Gene Nomenclature Database: Genew3 We have now resolved possible confusion surrounding our recent introduction of accession numbers, known as HGNC numbers. Originally each new gene and its associated data received an HGNC number, and this number remained the same regardless of the approved gene symbol; if the approved symbol changed the "previously approved" symbol received a new HGNC number. This was necessary because these previous (or withdrawn) symbols had their own entries in our database, partly to give them a different status from other literature aliases. We have now decided that this is impractical, so now there is only one HGNC number per gene, and this entry contains all the information including literature aliases and previous gene symbols. This means that some HGNC numbers (referring to previous symbols) have seemingly disappeared from the public database. Complications will only arise in the following situations: 1) Gene records are merged. The resulting gene record will contain all the information including the redundant HGNC number in the alias field 2) A gene record is split. The "new" gene record will have its own HGNC number and will also have the original HGNC number in its alias field. In the process of altering our records, we have also checked the withdrawn symbols and literature aliases to remove any duplications and formatting errors. We now have 8340 literature aliases and 2517 withdrawn symbols. We have also created a number of new downloadable files at the following URLs: http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/public-files/ nomen/ens1.txt containing: HGNC ID, SWISSPROT ID, Ref Seq ID http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/public-files/ nomen/ens2.txt containing: HGNC ID, Gene Approved Symbol http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/public-files/ nomen/ens4.txt containing: HGNC ID, Approved Symbols, Aliases, Previous Symbol(s) |
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