Hopefully, everyone in the SEA-PHAGES community is well into the swing of the new semester.  Now is a great time to start collecting some institution-specific data and aggregating it into program-wide numbers.  In the next couple of days, an email will be sent to SEA-PHAGES faculty inviting them to begin using seaphages.org and entering relevant data.

Verified Faculty Abilities

If you've been marked as a Verified Faculty member, you'll be able to make some changes to the data stored in and displayed by seaphages.org.  Here's some things you'll want to do.  Just sign in using your PhagesDB account (it works on both PhagesDB and seaphages.org), head to your institution's page, and get cracking!

• Modify your faculty profile so that it's got all appropriate data.
• Modify your institution's information to keep it up to date.
• Add shipping/mailing addresses to your institution.
• Add other faculty members from your institution who are involved with SEA-PHAGES.
• And perhaps most importantly, enter an academic term and its associated sections in the database.

This last item in particular will allow us all to see, for the first time, how many sections/students are currently engaged in phage discovery and genomics, where they are, how different institutions are implementing this course, etc.

Sequencing Tie-In

All sequencing this year will be done via us at the University of Pittsburgh, primarily using our new Illumina MiSeq sequencer.  We're excited for our new commitment to sequence one phage per section rather than one phage per institution as in the past.  Of course, we can't make our sequencing plan unless we know how many sections are out there, so we'll assume each school is sending us one sample per section entered in seaphages.org.  So please enter all of your sections!

Issues

As always, with something new there are bound to be a few issues/hiccups.  Please contact us or email me directly if you have problems or ideas about how things might work better.