[Cnidaria] CORAL AND SYMBIODINIUM GENOME PROJECT SURVEYS

[Shini Sunagawa]

Dear everyone,

We just released CORAL AND SYMBIODINIUM GENOME PROJECT SURVEYS. By 
posting an announcement here on Cnidarialist, we hope to extend our 
audience and would appreciate your participation in the survey. Please 
see below.

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Multiple labs are currently pursuing genomic approaches to address 
questions in coral biology. Having access to whole genome sequences 
would clearly facilitate research in our field. In the past few years, 
several white papers have been submitted to multiple agencies by members 
of the coral-Symbiodinium research community for whole genome projects. 
While receiving positive reviews, mainly due to large genome sizes, the 
genome projects have been slow to progress. With the advent of the new 
sequencing technologies, whole genome projects seem now more feasible 
than ever. Prioritizing collectively, as a user community, the choice of 
species for sequencing would strengthen our case and could expedite 
getting to the whole genome goal sooner.

We would appreciate if you take the time to respond to two relevant 
surveys regarding the prospects of coral and Symbiodinium genome 
projects. We request that you provide your email address to prevent 
multiple submissions that may bias the outcome of the surveys. Please 
make sure to respond by June 30th.


We are planning to report the results of the survey during the last 30 
minutes of our mini-symposium on genomics of coral reef organisms at the 
ICRS. We also hope to discuss the different ongoing initiatives.

CORAL:
http://www.makesurvey.net/cgi-bin/survey.dll/73B6CFA928B74F9EA655CEDED395B4EE

SYMBIODINIUM:
http://www.makesurvey.net/cgi-bin/survey.dll/B21971DE728145E6AC9262977077FCF7

Your feedback will be instrumental in getting consensus in the whole 
coral reef community to make the most effective use of our brief 
discussion so we can push the genome efforts forward. Your involvement 
in the projects will also be critical from supporting white paper 
submissions to genome annotations, when the time comes.

We look forward to hearing from you and discussing this exciting 
endeavor with all interested parties in July.

Mónica, Mary Alice and Jodi