Updates from the Working Groups

Today is the deadline for responding to the Phase 2 RFP. Proposals will be presented and formally reviewed by the project team in teleconferences on 3 and 5 October 2011. Projects selected to receive shared-risk funding will be notified by the end of October.

Members of the sequence services team have also launched the Pistoia Alliance Sequence Squeeze Competition, which will award $15,000 to the best, novel, open-source compression algorithm for gene sequence data. Four prestigious judges have been recruited to evaluate entries: Guy Coates (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), Jun Wang (BGI), Matthew Trunnel (Broad Institute), and Pistoia's own Nick Lynch.

Check out the Sequence Squeeze Competition »

Read FAQs on Sequence Services Phase 2 »

SESL

The SESL project public demonstrator for brokering gene data associated with Type 2 diabetes has been completed. SESL project lead Ian Harrow will participate in the Open PHACTS/GEN2PHEN workshop on 19-20 September 2011 to explore the feasibility of collaborating with OpenPHACTS to evolve the SESL concepts into a fully functional knowledge brokering service. Ian will also be sharing the impacts and learnings of this project at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo Europe. When not on tour with SESL, Ian and the rest of the team are working on two papers for publication about the project. The SESL website will contain the latest updates on the project.

Access SESL public demonstrator »

Read more about SESL »

Vocabulary Services

Lee Harland has been leading the effort to develop the Vocabulary Services Initiative (VSI) working group, ably supported by Ian Dix and Sorana Popa (AstraZeneca). A paper titled "Empowering Industrial Research with Shared Biomedical Vocabularies" is to be published in Drug Discovery Today - most likely in the November 2011 issue. Support and funding is needed to develop VSI's ideas into specific projects.

Learn more about VSI »