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Welcome to Xine, the source
for Xenopus news and information. Here's what's
happening.
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>From Nancy Papalopulu:
Xenopus tropicalis EST Clones
As part of the Xenopus tropicalis EST Project (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Projects/X_tropicalis), the Sanger Institute has generated approximately 55,000 5' EST sequences from each of three X.tropicalis cDNA libraries>From Steve Klein:
ANNOUNCEMENTS
QUESTIONS
Fifty Xenopus cDNA libraries are available at http://image.llnl.gov/image/html/xenopuslib_info.shtml 44 are laevis and 6 are trop. Not all can be used for FL sequencing; some are either short or not very diverse. Sanger is doing 3 more tropicalis libraries, but they will not sample all the possible tissues. Do we need more libraries? Which stages, tissues, etc?
a) How many Xenopus genes are there?
b) What proportion of these should we have a Full-Length cDNA sequence for?
c) What level of errors can be tolerated in these sequences? Standard MGC protocol is to do 1 error/ 50,000 - 100,000 bases. Do you need that level of accuracy, or is 1 error/ 1,000 bases okay? If it costs less for the lower error rate, we could sequence more cDNAs for the same money.
Are there any Xenopus population geneticists?
Send your answers to
Steve Klein (NICHD) KleinS@Exchange.NIH.GOV
and Daniela Gerhard. (NCI) gerhardd@mail.nih.gov
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>From Richard Harland:
Xenopus tropicalis BAC filters are now available from CHORI.
http://bacpac.chori.org/xenopus216.htm
AND
The call for requests to sequence Xenopus tropicalis BACs is posted on the JGI web site at http://genome.jgi-psf.org/xenopus1/xenopus1.home.html
There will shortly be a
meeting of the advisory board to consider the priorities for sequencing.
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Following is a request for letters of support from Jacques Robert and Nicholas Cohen to establish a Xenopus stock collection for immunological research. As you may know, letters of support are critical to establish resources of the type. If this resource is something that you think may be useful to the community and your research, please contact Jacques.
Dear Colleagues,
Xenopus is clearly recognized as a unique nonmammalian model system for studying fundamental immunobiological questions. The recent closing of the world's primary Xenopus resource facility at the Basel Institute of Immunology in Switzerland, however, has made the preservation and further development of a widely available Xenopus collection for immunological research problematic. Currently, the Xenopus collection at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry is the only one in the world with a large population of different inbred strains of X. laevis, isogenetic clones of laevis-gilli hybrids, and Xenopus subspecies.
Presently, this resource is basically dedicated to providing animals for our own research. If our facility is to serve a larger community of scientists, then its maintenance and future development needs extramural support in addition to that earmarked for our hypothesis-driven research programs. To this end, we are planning to submit an R24 Research Resources grant application to the NIH; NIAID has agreed to consider funding the program if a scientifically strong case can be made to do so. We have attached an RTF version of a prospectus of our plans for this facility that has been submitted to the NIH. If you can not open this attachment please let us know. (please contact Jacques for the attachment).
The Xenopus facility we envision would not only maintain genetically defined animals, but would also maintain existing, and develop new, immunologically important reagents (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, tumor cell lines, cDNA etc) for Xenopus research. As such, we believe that the proposed facility would be of direct interest and benefit to our scientific colleagues in immunology as well as in other disciplines. As such, would be complementary to, rather than compete with, the NIH-supported Xenopus tropicalis project.
Our R24 application will be stronger if we can demonstrate that our proposed facility will benefit multiple NIH-funded investigators, especially those funded by NIAID. Please let us know your level of enthusiasm for this project. If you think that it would be of benefit to your current and/or future research activities, please indicate whether you would be willing to provide us with a letter of support. We will then get back to you with further details about the nature of your letter. We would also appreciate it if you would forward this email and attachment to other colleagues who potentially might be interested in endorsing this project.
Thank you for your cooperation.
With best regards,
Jacques Robert, Ph.D. Jacques robert@uhura.cc.rochester.edu Nicholas Cohen, Ph.D.
Jacques ROBERT, Ph. D.
Research Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
Department of Microbiology & Immunology
Box 672
University of Rochester
Medical Center
Rochester, NY 14642 USA
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Until next time.
Bruce