Happy New Year! We are looking forward to a productive 2010 for the IDAWG. We want to update you on some of the recent activities of the group, as well as plans for the near future.
The IDAWG has met twice since our last update; first, in conjunction with the ASHI meeting held in San Francisco on November 2, and then at the ASEATTA meeting in New Delhi on November 16. Summaries of both the ASHI and ASEATTA meetings can be found on the IDAWG web pages; for those of you that were present, please let us know if there is anything that you would like to add. Steve Mack apologizes to those of you who are wondering why you did not know about the meeting on November 15; he made a mistake when sending out the meeting notification and agenda, and only a few of you received it.
Our meeting at ASHI marked the establishment of the IDAWG as a subcommittee of the ASHI Scientific and Clinical Affairs Committee (SCAC). As such, Steve and Jill will participate in the full meetings of the SCAC and update that group on IDAWG activities. We feel that a formal relationship with ASHI will enhance our efforts to develop and institute data reporting standards for the immunogenomics field. We are hoping to establish similar relationships with EFI and ASEATTA.
As we've mentioned previously, we have been invited to submit a commentary to Tissue Antigens discussing the general need for standardized methods and tools in immunogenomic research. The October 2009 project update included a draft outline for this commentary, and several IDAWG members have agreed to contribute to this article. If you are interested in contributing, please let us know. We feel that the commentary will have significantly more impact with the combined input from the members of this group, and hope that many of you will agree to be authors.
We want to thank those of you who volunteered to beta-test the ANTT and UNCL tools. We've completed the beta-tests and plan to make the tools available for general use this month. We will notify the working group when these tools are available.
Pierre-Antoine Gourraud and Mike Feolo's letter to Tissue Antigens regarding the need for standardized reporting of SNP identifiers is being published. See, Gourraud PA, Feolo M. (2009) The Babel Tower revisited: SNPs - Indels - CNVs. Confusion in naming sequence variant always rises from ashes. Tissue Antigens. 2009 Dec 20., for details.
We have drafted a set of IDAWG-related links for the web pages. Please take a look at www.igdawg.org/links.html and let us know if there are any additional IDAWG-related links you think should be included. Please also let us know if you have any suggestions or comments pertaining to the web pages in general.
Finally, our next meeting will be held in conjunction with the annual EFI meeting, which will be held in Florence, Italy from May 15-18. We plan to submit an abstract reflecting the outline for the Tissue Antigens commentary, and we will circulate this for your review prior to submission. If you plan to attend the EFI meeting and are available to meet during that time, please let us know. As the date gets closer, we will finalize the time and place, and as always we will try to accommodate those of you that are interested in participating remotely via Skype or telephone.
Many thanks,
Jill and Steve