The year 2014 has seen rapid progress in building sea lice genomics, most importantly, the final genome assembly and Ensembl annotation of the salmon louse genome is available to members of the Centre. We are now able to browse the genome, edit the annotation, upload and search experiments linked to genes in the genome and much more. Tons of - mainly RNA-seq data - have also been processed and uploaded to LiceBase. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed content to LiceBase, uploaded experiments, and provided feed-back. It's the valuable content that makes LiceBase a unique resource.

As this year comes to an end, we should make a list of things that will be attempted next year together with a prioritization of tasks. Extending the functionality of LiceBase, making it more user friendly while keeping up to date with Drupal and Tripal releases will be major tasks. Also, integration with other resources developed nationally and internationally will allow us to profit from our previous achievements. What is more, it is our aim to make LiceBase an open resource available to the general public together with the publication of a genome paper during next year.

BlastGraphicsViewer has been updated successfully. As a little goodie, the tree in the gene finding guide section on finding genes by sequence has been updated too. It now opens a new window with the correct Blast settings pre-set. If you are in doubt about which Blast settings to use, simply follow the decision process through the tree and click one of the green notes. Then paste in the search sequence.

The search mask for sequence features has been updated. It now allows to search for genomic features by their annotation. A few genes from the annotation have received human readable annotations, e.g. 'Putative chitinase' in addition to their Ensembl gene ids (EMLSAG).

These annotation properties can now be searched for by entering a search phrase into the "Search annotation text" field. This search is case sensitive. Annotations can be stored as different annotations properties, default for human readable is "Note".

We are proud to present LiceBase to the global sea lice research community at the SeaLice 2014 conference in Portland, Maine. The presentation of LiceBase takes place today, Sept. 2. There will also be a life demonstration for an interested audience on Sept. 3 in the afternoon (time to be announced). There are a lot of highly interesting talks on sea lice biology today, which depict the use of genomic resources of sea lice that are also available in LiceBase. There are several keys to sustainable sea lice control in its genome some of which are presented today.