Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Tribolium castaneum is a member of the most species-rich eukaryotic order, a powerful model organism for the study of generalized insect development, and an important pest of stored agricultural products. We describe its genome sequence here. This omnivorous beetle has evolved the ability to interact with a diverse chemical environment, as shown by large expansions in odorant and gustatory receptors, as well as P450 and other detoxification enzymes. Development in Tribolium is more representative of other insects than is Drosophila , a fact reflected in gene content and function. For example, Tribolium has retained more ancestral genes involved in cell–cell communication than Drosophila , some being expressed in the growth zone crucial for axial elongation in short-germ development. More at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature06784.html http://www.bcm.edu/news/item.cfm?newsID=1090 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=genomeprj&Cmd=Retrieve...

" Work created before the existence of copyright and patent laws also form part of the public domain . The Bible and the inventions of Archimedes are in the public domain. However, copyright may exist in translations or new formulations of this work. " [ Wikipedia ] As posted by Tony is the Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) discouraging using their CAS services for assigning correct CAS numbers to structures for any third party database. Wikipedia is a source of structures, which is public domain due to its GNU FDL . Still, this does not imply that any translation of structures, e.g. CAS numbers, are in the public domain, too. Honestly, this raises a serious problem for curating CAS numbers on Wikipedia and this raises indeed the question, if they should not be dropped from Wikipedia, and any other information source, at all? Is it not better having no information, than having wrong information? A CAS number is for me only one certain translation of a chemical structure....