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The Lepbase team from Edinburgh (Richard, Sujai, and Reuben) attended the Tenth International Heliconius meeting in Panama in July 2015. Many thanks to Owen McMillan for hosting the meeting at the stunning Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) field station in Gamboa.
The day before the meeting was spent examining Heliconiines at the STRI insectaries, and walking along Old Pipeline Road catching specimens. The scientific talks were outstanding and ranged from population genetics of polymorphism to developmental genetics experiments to behavioural studies on wing pattern fluorescence. John Davey’s talk on the 21 chromosomes of Heliconius melpomene was voted the best talk of the meeting and we are delighted to host the new high-quality reference genome assembly Hmel2 at Lepbase.
We conducted a 1.5 hour workshop on Lepbase where Rich provided an overview of why Lepbase was started and our goals, Sujai did a walkthrough of the browser-based features and tools, and Reuben demonstrated how to use the Perl API to mine the Ensembl MySQL database underpinning Lepbase. We got lots of great feedback on how people imagined using Lepbase and other features they would like to see. End-users said they would like a way to visualise variants from resequencing data from population genetics studies, a BioMart style interface to download data for genes/regions/sequences of interest, and tools for enabling community annotation of new genomes. We have already set up a WebApollo server for community annotation in Release 1.0 and plan to incorporate the other new features as a top priority.