Dear Tetrahymena Community members,

 We are delighted to announce that the Tetrahymena Stock Center has been awarded funding
by NIH and the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).

 We are very grateful to NIH for continued funding, and to all the members of the Tetrahymena
community who have supported our efforts to establish a functional stock center at Cornell
University. We are excited that this new funding will allow us to expand the purview of the Stock
Center and pursue several goals that will benefit the Tetrahymena community as a whole.

 First, we will continue to maintain a large variety of genetic stocks in our secure facilities at
Cornell University and make them available to the scientific and educational community. We are
constantly seeking to expand the diversity of the strains in the Stock Center as a resource for the
community at-large.  We are currently are working to complete the acquisition and documentation
of several large strain collections, including the critical collections developed by Dr. Eduardo Orias,
Dr. Martin Gorovsky, and Dr. Joseph Frankel. In addition, we are now accepting strains from other
laboratories to provide a secure site for strains they wish to share with the community. We are
also actively providing strains to researchers and educators around the world. We encourage
everyone to visit our updated website at  http://tetrahymena.vet.cornell.edu/ . We have new
expediated online ordering and have streamlined the process for depositing cells. We welcome any
comments, suggestions, ideas for other things that you would like to see on this site.

 Second, as part of our continuing efforts to make the Tetrahymena Stock Center as useful as
possible to the entire Tetrahymena community, we have expanded the purview of the Stock Center
to include support for the Tetrahymena Genome Database (TGD). TGD is no longer actively
maintained at Stanford and is fast becoming outdated. We believe that making TGD operational
under the auspices of the Stock Center and linking support efforts to community annotation
strongly complements the overall mission of the Stock Center to facilitate the use of Tetrahymena
as a research and teaching organism. We look forward to working with Dr. Nick Stover at Bradley
University, who will supervise the development of a genome Wiki and further annotation of the
database. Revising the TGD format will be an exciting and challenging task that we hope will
involve many members of the Tetrahymena community.  We will send out a more detailed
explanation of the new TGD format soon. For now, we thank Dr. Mike Cherry for his continued
support and help in working with Dr. Stover to make the transition to the Wiki format as easy as
possible.

 Finally, please continue to use the Stock Center for all of your strain needs, and don’t forget
to include the costs for strain ordering in your respective grant applications.  Contact us with any
questions, suggestions, ideas at [log in to unmask] . We look forward
to working with the community to enhance the scope and function of the Tetrahymena Stock
Center over the next 5 years.


Sincerely,

   Ted Clark

   Donna Cassidy-Hanley