Fish and Chips Winter 2020

ZFIN: The Latest Updates

Over the past several months ZFIN staff have been busy updating heavily used pages on zfin.org including the home page and the gene page.  The new home page features a much cleaner and simplified layout as well as highlights from some recently curated papers.  The new gene page includes a completely new page layout with a page index at the left margin.  The index allows you to navigate directly to any section of the page.  The expression and phenotype sections of the gene page were completely redesigned to bring forward images, annotations, and citations, which the zebrafish researchers asked for in recent community surveys.  Additional new features throughout the page include more information provided in tables, and table sorting and searching.  These new features will be included on additional pages throughout ZFIN as they are updated. These updates and more are described in more detail in the next Database issue of Nucleic Acids Research.

ZFIN: NIH cuts funding for ZFIN and other MODs

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the NIH, has reduced the core grants that fund ZFIN and the other Model Organism Databases (MODs), including SGD, Wormbase, Flybase, and MGI. Current funding is at 75% of the 2016 level and future cuts will further reduce funding to 50%. Final cuts for the Gene Ontology Consortium (GO) have not been established yet.

In the meantime, the Alliance of Genome Resources (AGR), which provides integrated views of some MOD and human data, has been established with funds from NHGRI. The overall impact of this new funding landscape, however, means that the MODs will be further reducing the services they can provide.

At ZFIN, we will work hard to continue what we can, however, our ability to curate your research papers, maintain the reference genome, curate and integrate directly submitted datasets, and manage nomenclature will be impacted.