Last Wednesday, our lead programmer (Max) was the guest speaker for the San Diego Bioinformatics User Series over at UCSD. We were thrilled to see a Mark2Curator show up for his talk (big shout out to TAdams), and understand that not everyone who wanted to attend could make it. Fortunately, we’ve recorded his presentation, and after editing it (to remove the excessive motion from my poor filming technique), we’ve finally made his talk available. The video processing is one reason why this newsletter was sent today rather than on Friday (when it should have been sent out.)

The other reason is that it’s Bertrand’s birthday! If you’re new to the Mark2Cure community, you might not be familiar with Bertrand Might, whose infectious grin graces our landing page. Bertrand’s birthday serves as a reminder of each unique NGLY1 child that has inspired Mark2Cure and of the rare disease community members who have joined the effort to make sense of the literature.

From all of us on the Mark2Cure development team, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Bertrand! We’d like to thank ALL of the Mark2Curators who have contributed to the current campaign! Thanks to you, we can proudly tell Bertrand’s parents that the Mark2Cure community has completed five doc sets (over 900 docs), submitting over 400,000 annotations.

Knowledge network generated from the completed doc sets: Congenital Disorders of Glycosylation (gray lines), Alacrima (purple lines), FBX2-Engase (orange lines), O-linked glycosylation disorders (red lines), and misfolded and mitochondrial (yellow lines) doc sets.

We’re not done yet and still need your help.

We have three doc sets in need of your contributions. Two of the doc sets are over 70% complete, but we can’t get them done without you. Help finish them by completing a quest today! Just contributing to one quest will make a huge difference. Lastly, please share Mark2Cure with anyone who might be interested. We need to grow our community in order to get these docs done quickly.