OMA Survey: we have a winner

First, we would like to thank all of you who participated in the survey. We received lots of constructive feedback. We will try to improve the OMA browser accordingly.

As promised, we drew a random entry from the responses, and the lucky person turned our to be... Dr. Albert Vilella from the Ensembl Compara team at EBI. Needless to say, we are delighted to see the iPod go to one of our best competitors... :-)

Thanks again to all of you. And don't wait for the next survey to send us any additional feedback you might have!

New release is here

The October 2009 release of OMA with 907 genomes is now online. The interruption of the OMA Browser was only for a short time, now everything should work well.

There is a slight change in the way alternative splicings are treated. From the current release on, only one splicing variants of a gene can have orthologs (we chose the one with the most matches in other genomes). This should have the effect that groups are more complete> Before, the different splicings variants had the tendency to be scattered among several groups.

And finally, we would like to point out again the survey on the OMA Browser. We really like to know your opinion so we can improve the OMA Browser. And you have the chance to win an iPod. Go here to fill out the survey, it won't take more than 5-10 minutes.

Coming up: new release with 907 genomes

Good news! We have finished the computation of a new data set with 907 genomes. Besides 78 new genomes (including metazoans such as the sloth, the liziard, zebra finch or the tick), we also have updated 55 older genomes.

If all goes well, the new data set will be available in the OMA Browser sometime next week. This can cause short interuption of the web server. If you are working on a project with the current data set, we recommend, that you download all the data you need before the change. However, the current release will still be available in the OMA Browser Archive.

Fill out our survey and win a new iPod nano!

Please help us improve your experience on the OMA Browser by taking our survey!

It has 15 questions and will only take you 5-10 minutes to fill out.

And as always, feel free to send us your feedback and suggestions by e-mail or in the comment section of this blog.

Coding DNA available for download

We are pleased that we can start this blog with some good news: the coding DNA for all OMA proteins are now available for download in fasta files. We have split them into two files, one for eukaryotes and one for prokaryotes. They are available on the download page: http://omabrowser.org/All/download.html

First Post

The famous first post! We will use this blog to publish news about OMA and the OMA Browser. Enjoy!