WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org/) continues to provide vital access to the genome and annotations of Caenorhabditis elegans and related nematodes. In the past year we have increased the biological scope of the resource by incorporating InParanoid homologies, BLASTP homologies to a preliminary assembly of the C. remanei genome, and manual curation of gene regulation and genetic interactions from the literature. Recently we introduced a wiki (http://www.wormbase.org/wiki) to provide a forum for comments and community annotation of such features.

Building on the consistency of annotations provided by the use of gene and sequence ontologies, we have developed an anatomy ontology describing the extensive anatomical, lineage, and neuronal connectivity data described in C. elegans. This ontology is cross-referenced to manually curated expression patterns. In the coming year we will introduce a new phenotype ontology in conjunction with extensive manual curation of phenotypic information at the single gene and -- when available -- allelic level.

Behind the scenes we have made many changes to continue providing a satisfying browsing experience. These changes include migrating from a single server to a multiply redundant server pool, adding a reverse proxy caching server, and precaching informationally-rich pages with each new release of the database. Interested users can stay up to date by subscribing to our RSS feed at http://www.wormbase.org/rss/wormbase-live.xml.