NOTICE: SANBI is in the process of moving premises. There will therefore be intermittent offline periods until 13 May 2010.
We are working on assuring the least amount of downtime and would appreciate your patience as we make this transition.

From IGGI

Kenyan Jamboree 19-23 May
A small group of annotators is working to finish off the annotation of contigs asssembled from over 124,000 g. morsitans ESTs. This effort is a continuation of the process started at the November 2007 Jamboree at SANBI, Cape Town, South Africa. The team consists of 10 Africans (East, West and South) and two non-African.

They will also attempt to do a substantial amount of annotation of g. palpalis data. This monumental task is undertaken with such zeal that they work from about 9 am to just short of 11pm, breaking only for well-deserved coffee, lunch and supper breaks.

5th IGGI meeting in Cape Town 18-21 November, 2007

The IGGI consortium met to discuss the status of development of the genome and how to exploit data from it for vector control, at SANBI, University of Western Cape.

IGGI meeting was proceeded with a 3 part workshop which was held with WHO/TDR support at the SA National Bioinformatics Institute from 5th – 19th November 2007.

The aim of the workshop was to selectively train a group of highly motivated individuals from endemic countries in the analysis of Tsetse genome and transcriptome data. 9 persons from 8 different countries were selected from the 26 highly qualified applicants.After a 3 day intensive training, the scientists were joined by an international group of experienced transcriptome annotation experts. The group of 45 scientists then devoted themselves to manual annotation of each of the 15 000 or so clusters and 17 000 singletons of transcripts that make up the Glossina morsitans transcriptome. In fact over 100 000 sequences were processed for the workshop, making it the most comprehensive analysis to date of a vector system for sleeping sickness. A publication is planned for July 2008. Comments on the workshop include

“It is fantastic that everyone has gotten behind the tsetse project so well and that it is rolling ahead so successfully - 
 it really is making a difference in the number of people interested in tsetse flies and I am certain this will only
 increase in rate as we progress to a full genome”- Mike Lehane.

Photos from the course are at http://picasaweb.google.com/geoffrey.attardo/SouthAfricaPictures