Dear Colleagues,
Happy New Year! We hope that 2012 is off to a good start for all of you. This year promises to be busy and productive for the IDAWG, as we continue our work toward implementing data standards for immunogenetics research and participate in the 16th International Histocompatibility Workshop, to be held in Liverpool in May.
We want to update you on the progress of the IDAWG workshop component. As you know, we have been conducting a survey, with ASHI's support, of data management methods within the immunogenetics community. A request for participation in the survey was emailed to ASHI laboratory directors and the entire EFI and APHIA memberships, and featured in an ASHI newsletter to the entire membership. We are happy to report we have had 130 laboratory representatives complete the survey to date; we are delighted with this level of participation, as we feel it represents a significant proportion of the immunogenetics clinical and research community. The responses are quite enlightening regarding data management practices within our community, and we look forward to sharing them with you and receiving your input, and ultimately presenting a full analysis of the survey in Liverpool. If you have not yet completed the survey, we urge you to do so; the survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/IDAWG.
As part of the workshop project, survey participants were asked if they would be interested in demonstrating their ambiguity reduction methods for HLA data on a model data set. We are happy to report that thus far twenty laboratories have agreed to participate in this second phase of the workshop project. We will be distributing a synthetic data set generated by the NMDP bioinformatics group to all second phase participants; these will be returned to us subsequent to the application of ambiguity reduction and we will analyze the data and the results will be reported in Liverpool. Again, we hope that many of you will be interested in participating in this phase of the project.
We have also circulated a letter to the editors of the leading immunogenetics journals, asking for their signatures in support of the STREIS statement outlined in our Tissue Antigens commentary (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1399-0039.2011.01777.x/abstract); we hope to have the letter published simultaneously in the participating journals.
Finally, we will have a meeting of the IDAWG during the workshop in Liverpool, and hope to see many of you there. Please let us know if you plan to attend.
Many thanks,
Jill and Steve