Dear Colleagues,
We hope that you have been well since the EFI meeting in May, and we apologize for not having been able to send out a project update sooner after the meeting.
On July 5th, we submitted a revision of our NIH R01 proposal ("Solutions for Immunogenomic Data Management and Analysis") seeking funding to support the efforts of the working group. We expect to receive a decision on the proposal in late October or early November of this year, and will keep you apprised of the outcome.
We have sent each of you a link to the working version of the Tissue Antigens commentary, which is available for editing as a set of Google docs documents. These consist of five documents (commentary sections 1-4 and references), along with the original outline of the commentary and a set of instructions for editing the commentary. Some of you have volunteered to author specific sections of the commentary, and we hope that more of you will be interested in contributing after taking a look at the working version. We would like to be able to circulate a more complete draft version of the commentary in advance of the ASHI meeting in September.
We have put a summary of the May 15th EFI IDAWG meeting on the IDAWG web-site. Please take a look and contact us if we omitted anything from the meeting. As discussed in the EFI IDAWG meeting, we will be surveying the ambiguity reduction methods in use in HLA and KIR communities as part of the IDAWG 16th Workshop project. Please let us know if you are interested in participating in the development of the survey and model datasets, and if your group would like to take part in the survey.
We plan on holding another meeting of the working group at the 36th ASHI conference (September 26-30, 2010) in Hollywood Florida. Please let us know if you are planning on attending the ASHI meeting. As with past meetings, we plan to have a skype option for connecting to the meeting for those of who who cannot attend in person.
Finally, we would like to organize a skype/conference call meeting of the IDAWG in August, in advance of the ASHI meeting. We have set up a Doodle poll to determine when the best time for such a meeting will be. Please be sure to set the poll to your local time-zone when you indicate your availability in August.
Cheers,
Steve and Jill