Protein interaction data:
* We have put the first preliminary protein interaction data onto Flannotator for 29 lines * Stocks are being prepared to be deposited at the Kyoto Stock Centre in January 2009, this means that they will become publicly available soon after. * In view of this and as a preparation for the last phase of the project including publication, it would be a good idea for all annotators to proof-read their entries to weed out any typos or other gremlins they don't want the whole world to see! * We have some new members of the team to welcome - Irena Armean, Selina Mehroke and Jose Paolo Magbanua - Paolo will join us in the New Year

Goodbye Ed!:
Everyone will be sad to hear that Ed Ryder is off to pastures new at the Sanger Institute. He has left the Flannotator in good order and there should be no noticeable change in the running of the database. Any problems or queries should be addressed to Helen Spriggs who already works on the Flyprot project and has taken over administration of the Flannotator - h.spriggs@gen.cam.ac.uk

Simple queries:
A new way of doing simple queries is now available. Just choose a tissue type, CV term, subcellular location or descriptor to search for.
Anatomy terms chosen will include those further down the annotation tree.
Results are filtered on your batches completed as usual.

10,000!:
We have now reached over 10,000 pieces of annotation!

New admin functions:
Administration functions have been added to allow users to edit experiment details, delete unwanted images or delete entire experiments (including all images and annotations).
WARNING!! once done the deletion actions cannot be undone, so please be very sure you want to do it before continuing.
For deleting unwanted images please move them to the unsorted bin first.

New developmental stages:
Following the new FlyBase developmental ontology (which split recently from the general anatomy ontology) some more general terms have been added to allow a range of stages. They are:

pre-blastoderm stage	Embryonic stages 1 - 3
blastoderm stage	Embryonic stages 4 - 5
gastrula stage	Embryonic stages 6 - 8
early extended germ band stage	Embryonic stages 9 - 10
late extended germ band stage	Embryonic stages 11 - 12
dorsal closure stage	Embryonic stages 13 - 15
late embryonic stage	Embryonic stages 16 - 17

You can use these terms if you are unsure exactly what stage you are looking at.

Protocol for 'glowing somewhere..':
We've had a few questions about what to do if you are not entirely sure where your signal is locating to. Please use the following protocol:
eg for the central nervous system:
If the signal is everywhere in the CNS as far as you can tell, annotate as CNS->ubiqitious
If the signal is in some particular part(s) of the CNS but you cannot be sure which, annotate as CNS->subset

If you're really unsure you can always put whole_organism->subset but I'm not sure how useful that would be!

NOT expression annotation:
Version 2.1 of the Flannotator has been released! The main addition to this is the ability to explicitly say where things are definitely NOT expressed. Just add a NOT branch to your annotations by clicking on the 'n' option by the cv term on your annotation tree, or by 'Add NOT' at the experiment root for anatomy terms

49th Drosophila Conference:
There will be a FlyProt talk at this year's Drosophila Research Conference in San Diego. The 'Techniques and Functional Genomics' platform session is scheduled for 11:30 on April 5th

6000 bits of annotation!:
We now have over 6000 annotations (6366 to be exact!) and over 5500 images currently in the database, so a big thank you to all our very productive annotators

Forums working:
The forums are now back up and working! New users now have to go through an email verification process. I shall try and answer any questions posted before they went down in the near future.

Server upgrade:
The server upgrade is complete and everything should be back to normal again. If you have any problems annotating please let us know.

Release 5.3:
The FlyProt data should now all be on Release5.3 sequence and annotation. Please let us know if anything seems out of place.

Annotation searching:
For annotators who have finished batches the gene search page is now working for searching for stocks up to the batch you have completed.

Flannotator v2.0 released!:
Flannotator v2.0 has been released! Please note this version currently only works with Internet Explorer 6+ and the FireFox web browser which you can download here.
This new version of the annotator allows for hierarchical annotation, subcellular location and descriptors, and also improvements to the CV term chooser. There is also the option to describe your own CV terms.