Besides running RNA informatics courses Rfam peoples will be working on the usual summer family-building exercise together with a bright summer student. Priority number one will be building the published RNA Biology articles that we ran out of time to do for the Rfam 10.0 release:
| SmY | MRP | Yfr2 | tmRNA |
| Trypanosomal H/ACA ncRNAs | GIR1 | U3 | SRP |
| influenza pseudoknot | ptaRNA1 | RsaOG | rsmX |
An exciting trend we’re starting to see is groups appending machine parsable alignments to their papers and writing Wikipedia articles for their families outside of the RNA families track. Of particular note are the 81 families from Zasha Weinberg’s latest papers [1-3] (see the table below). Also, Daniel Gautheret’s and Wade Winkler’s groups are supporting this effort with their respective CsfG RNA [4] and EAR motif [5] articles. Rightly or wrongly we are crediting some of this to the increased exposure of Rfam’s requirements from the RNA families track at the journal RNA Biology. This, by the way, for the first time has an impact factor, which is a fantastic 5.559. RNA Biology is punching well above its weight for now, long may this continue. Once our super summer student has finished with these (much easier families) he’ll be moving on to our terrifyingly long list of potential Rfam families that are waiting to be built. If you see anything on this list you might be interested in writing an RNA biology article for then please let us know as soon as possible.
In other news, we’re still hunting for good people to join a revamped Xfam group. In a few days we’ll be advertising Curator positions and we’re still looking for a Senior Computational Biologist. Check the Sanger Jobs site over the next few days.
[1] Weinberg Z, Wang JX, Bogue J, Yang J, Corbino K, Moy RH, Breaker RR (2010) Comparative genomics reveals 104 candidate structured RNAs from bacteria, archaea, and their metagenomes. Genome Biology
[2] Weinberg Z, Perreault J, Meyer MM, Breaker RR (2009) Exceptional structured noncoding RNAs revealed by bacterial metagenome analysis. Nature.
[3] Meyer MM, Ames TD, Smith DP, Weinberg Z, Schwalbach MS, Giovannoni SJ, Breaker RR. (2009) Identification of candidate structured RNAs in the marine organism ‘Candidatus Pelagibacter ubique’. BMC Genomics.
[4] Marchais A, Duperrier S, Gautheret D, Stragier P. (2010). A sporulation-specific, small noncoding RNA highly conserved in endospore formers. In preparation.
[5] Irnov I & Winkler WC (2010) A regulatory RNA required for antitermination of biofilm and capsular polysaccharide operons in Bacillales. Mol Microbiol.
Xfam Blog 
July 12, 2010 at 9:29 am
Thank you for this detailed overview!