Author: Monica Munoz-Torres

2016 Biocuration Career Award

The International Society for Biocuration
is proud to announce the first
Biocuration Career Award.

 

The Biocuration Career Award recognizes biocurators in non-leadership positions who have made sustained contributions to the field of biocuration.

The nominations will be reviewed by the newly formed ISB Award Committee, comprised of one member of the ISB’s Executive Committee (ISB-EC) and six (6) additional members from the wider research community; these members were nominated by the ISB-EC based on diversity in area of expertise, organization type, role, and geographic location.

Who can nominate and/or be nominated?

  • Any currently active ISB member may nominate anyone in the field of biocuration, whether the potential nominee is a member of ISB or not.
  • Members of the ISB can make no more than 1 nomination per year.
  • Those who hold Principal Investigator or Group Leader positions, or who are current members of the ISB Executive Committee or the ISB Award Committee, are not be eligible for this award.
  • Self-nominations will not be considered.

How to submit your nomination:

  • Nominations should be sent via email to the award committee at intsocbio [at] gmail.com with the subject line “Biocuration Career Award Nominations“.
  • The nomination email should contain the following fields:
    • Nominator details (name, e-mail and affiliation, member of ISB);
    • Nominee details (name, e-mail and affiliation);
    • Short list of scholarly contributions (a maximum of 50 words);
    • Brief description of why you are recommending this person (a maximum of 350 words).

The recipient of the award will be invited to give a presentation at the following International Biocuration Conference, with all expenses paid by the ISB.

Important Dates for 2016

Deadline to submit nominations: Sunday 20-March-2016
Award Announcement: April, 2016 at the 9th International Biocuration Conference

 

Sincerely,

The 2016 ISB Award Committee.

 

The 2016 “Biocuration Career” Award Committee are:
Melissa Haendel (Chair)
Emma Ganley
Takashi Gojobori
David Landsman
Michele Magrane
Kimberly Van Auken
Alfonso Valencia

CTD turned 10!

The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary on the web. Since its beginnings, CTD has been devoted to centralizing and harmonizing information about genes responding to environmental toxic agents across diverse species. The database has now evolved into a premier toxicology resource, allowing scientists to discover information and develop testable hypotheses about the biological consequences of chemical exposure (both environmental and drug). Today, CTD includes over 24 million toxicogenomic connections relating chemicals/drugs, genes/proteins, diseases, taxa, phenotypes, Gene Ontology annotations, and pathways.

This celebratory milestone was recently published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, which summarized the history and evolution of CTD, including descriptions of curation processes, new content, and enhanced visualization and analysis tools. The article also detailed a new “Pathway View” tool that leverages gene interaction data from BioGRID to allow users to build unique toxicogenomic interaction modules connecting chemical exposure to disease events.

As it was ten years ago, CTD today is still managed by a small team of biologists and software engineers who work with both the toxicology and biocuration communities to advance understanding of chemical-gene-disease data and how best to extract and code this information from the published literature. All CTD data are freely available to the public. As well, CTD content has been disseminated further into the scientific community via more than 55 other databases that routinely incorporate CTD’s annotations. If interested in establishing links to CTD data, please notify us and follow these instructions.

CDT_10yearsCDT