Congratulations to Val Wood, PomBase Curator and Project Manager, who has been awarded a DSc by the University of Manchester for her thesis entitled "Curating and Analysing the Genome of a Model Eukaryote".
Fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) is a model organism used to study many aspects of basic cell biology, including the cell cycle, chromosome biology, epigenetics and cytoskeletal processes. The data knowledge acquired from fission yeast is often informative about human biology as 75% of fission yeast proteins have human equivalents.
Consistent and accurate curation is important for the sharing and dissemination of scientific knowledge, and is increasingly necessary for hypothesis generation and experimental planning. For fission yeast, this involves identifying genes and describing their biological role through comprehensive gene-oriented manual curation of published literature. Val's doctoral thesis combines a number of publications related to the curation of fission yeast genes and the use of fission yeast data over the past 25 years. This begins with the sequencing of the fission yeast genome, and includes selected publications describing curation and data integration, and the development of the model organism database 'PomBase'. Val's thesis also includes contributions to publications that utilise functional curation to analyse genome-wide phenotypic data, and finally describes the successful PomBase community curation programme.
Val became involved in the curation and hosting of fission yeast data at the beginning of the genome sequencing project. "I found myself in the situation where the fission yeast research community relied on my efforts, and this meant that I didn't get around to writing a PhD thesis", said Val. "Meanwhile, I built up a considerable body of published work and it seemed easier, and more appropriate, to gather the major papers together in a DSc thesis. I hope that having this recognition will improve my ability to garner the funds, and recruit the co-workers, necessary to maintain PomBase, and to extend the range and value of all model organism databases."