ANISEED Sustainability – Financial Support from the Community ?

Dear Tunicate Community,

I hope that everyone is doing well in this unprecedented period.

As you probably know, ANISEED is not currently supported by any core funding, as there is no such scheme available in France. The curation of the system, in addition to its general maintenance and new tool development is therefore only possible thanks to the contribution of individual labs from the community. In 2020, the community contributed to obtaining 25,000€ (Thank you!!!). This was in part used to employ Marion Gueroult-Bellone for a short term contract (she is currently halfway through her contract). She curated 21 articles with 383 experiments (among them 186 in mutant condition) and 35 regulatory regions analysis.

With this message, we would like to invite you to contribute to this effort for 2021. You can do so as a simple donation if the financial rules of your country allow this. We can send you a receipt. We can also send you an invoice justified with a generic motif such as “contribution to the maintenance of the ANISEED database” or “Contribution to the curation and public sharing of ascidian data”. This is for instance what Hiroki Nishida, Billie Swalla, Kohji Hotta, Lucia Manni, Alberto Stolfi and Alex McDougall/Rémi Dumollard did in the last few years. Alternatively, you can justify a financial contribution by the hosting and public sharing via ANISEED of a specific dataset (e.g. a 5 genomic browser for a genome you have sequenced or a section of the database corresponding to a species). This complies with the FAIR guidelines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_data) imposed by most Data Management Plans. This can be planned ahead through the mention of subcontracting to ANISEED in your grant applications. We’re happy to provide you with a paragraph. This was done last year by Lionel Christiaen, Simon Blanchoud and Patrick Lemaire. If necessary, we can also prepare a quote and send you a report of the work done with your contribution to justify the payment. To simplify the procedure from your end, you are welcome to put me in direct contact with your finance officer.

Thank you in advance for your contribution, we hope to be able to continue our curation work thanks to you and to continue to employ Marion next year.

PS: If you want to accelerate the incorporation of published article data into ANISEED, so as to make your data FAIR, please fill in this form. We will put your article in our list of items to be curated in priority.

Call for original tunicate media – digitalmarine e-learning project

From Haley Flom / Observatoire Océanologique de Banyuls-sur-Mer Sorbonne Université

Hello tunicate community,

I am emailing to follow up on a call for media made at the last International Tunicate Meeting in Villefranche-sur-Mer. My name is Haley Flom and I am collaborating with Sébastien Darras, Stefano Tiozzo, and Jean-Philippe Chambon on a tunicate module for a marine bio e-learning project called DigitalMarine (site currently under construction). As we are in the process of creating the learning material, we are looking for original, high quality media that could be used in the lessons. We are more specifically looking for:

  • videos of tunicates in the wild (ideally of each of the three classes)
  • photos of ascidians, salps, doliolids, pyrosomes, larvaceans
  • any original diagrams and animations
  • confocal time lapses
  • movies or images of embryos

As this is for an online course, the media will not be used for any commercial purposes, but since the learning material will be online and publically available, we must have authorization to use the media.  Of course, any media used for the project will have credit given!

If you have any original images/media or diagrams/animations to which you have author’s rights, and would like to share them with us for this project, please contact any of the three coordinators at:

darras@obs-banyuls.fr, tiozzo@obs-villefranche.fr, jean-philippe.chambon@upmc.fr

Many thanks and have a great weekend!

Haley

International survey on of marine bioinvasions

📣 From Bella Galil (galil@post.tau.ac.il) et al.:
We seek to document the key drivers and issues that may impact, over the next three decades, the magnitude, study, and management of marine bioinvasions through the collective voices of scientists, managers, conservationists, and other stakeholders around the world.

Your answers to the questions in this survey will provide the key status, trend, and geospatial data to
identify the priority issues of invasions in the sea in order to produce local, regional, national and
global intensity maps of the pressures and risks we face.
The need for a fully international perspective − and for your participation in achieving this goal − on
marine bioinvasions could not be more pressing. Climate change is altering and shifting spatial and
habitat availability for marine species globally, coastal infrastructure (artificial habitat) amenable to alien species colonization is rapidly increasing world-wide, global transport of marine life continues
unabated through a growing diversity of vectors, and one of the world’s greatest interoceanic
corridors, the Arctic Ocean, is opening.

▶️The survey : www.tinyurl.com/mbi2050 . 
▶️The deadline : March 29, 2019.

New call for PhD grants is open at the University of Padova (Italy)

Application deadline: June 26th, 2018
Detailed information and application forms here
Curricula:
Biochemistry and Biotechnology
Cell Biology and Physiology
Evolution, Ecology and Conservation
Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics.

If you are interested in a PhD on ascidians (Lucia Manni’s lab), please contact Lucia Manni : lucia.manni@UNIPD.IT.

Contribution needed for the next issue of Ascidian News (#81)

Please send to Gretchen Lambert (gretchen.lambert00@GMAIL.COM) a paragraph for News and Views, Work In Progress, pdfs of New Publications, abstracts of papers presented at recent meetings (include the full abstract, name of the meeting, its location and date), thesis abstracts of Masters and Ph.D. projects, etc. 

Due date is June 1. 

The Ascidian News Webpage