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Genetic Code Expansion Bulletin Board

Genetic Code Expansion Bulletin Board

The Genetic Code Expansion Bulletin Board (GCEbb) is an electronic mailing list intended to host discussions and informational postings related to the development and use of genetic code expansion technologies in research and teaching. It is meant to support the growth of a cohesive and well-networked world-wide GCE user and developer community through promoting helpful conversations among newcomers and experts. This means any GCE-related topic is acceptable, and you will get responses from scientists at the GCE4All Center and elsewhere who have GCE expertise. We anticipate that common uses of the bulletin board will be for anyone working with or wanting to work with GCE tools in their research or teaching:

  • to seek help in troubleshooting GCE approaches and getting past roadblocks
  • to ask about tools available and find best strategies for effectively applying existing GCE tools to answer research questions of interest
  • to propose ideas for GCE tools that would be great to have developed or improved on
  • to post information about relevant new GCE tools, resources and services
  • to post job vacancies

GCE technologies are currently highly underutilized because of real and perceived challenges that hinder their use, and the GCEbb is one avenue being taken by GCE4All to promote research advances through making GCE technologies easier to use and more widely accessible.

Using the bulletin board

The GCEbb email list is administered by JISCmail. The list is public, meaning that the archives can be accessed by anyone and will be indexed by search engines.

Subscribing

You may subscribe by visiting the GCEbb bulletin board subscription page and selecting one of the options. “Regular” will send messages as they arrive, whereas “digest” will compile multiple emails into a daily or weekly digest. More information is available at JISCmail help. If you want to change your email address on GCEbb, or have some other request, please send an email to the list owner (GCEBB-request@jiscmail.ac.uk)

Once you are subscribed to the list, you will automatically receive a copy of each message posted to the list. You can also post a message to GCEbb by sending it as an email directly to GCEbb@jiscmail.ac.uk.

To prevent abuse of the mailing list (and particularly to prevent spam being posted to the list), only members of the GCEbb list are able to post to it. Be sure to subscribe with the email address you will use to post messages, as the system will check your incoming email against the subscribed email address.

GCEbb etiquette

An extensive set of useful tips on the etiquette of posting questions to groups such as GCEbb can be found in this FAQ from Eric Raymond. The advice amounts to: be considerate and think before posting. Some specific rules:

  • Attachments are discouraged. We strongly discourage the use of attachments to messages, as they can cause complications. If you wish to show something related to your posting, such as an image of a gel, please place the image on the web somewhere and include a link in the GCEbb posting.
  • We do not condone illegal file sharing, and breaking of copyright. To avoid any misunderstandings, please do not use the GCEbb to ask for PDFs of articles.
  • While it is reasonable to share and ask for personal experiences with GCE tools and expression systems, please share specifics of your experience rather than making broad claims about what does or doesn’t work and what is “best.” This is respectful of the work of those that have generated tools and recognizes that circumstances matter and tools work differently in different contexts.
  • Many experts freely give their time to answer questions on GCEbb. Out of courtesy to them and to help build a strong and healthy world-wide GCE community, please use real names when posting questions.

Bulletin board archives

Older messages can be browsed and searched at the list's home page:

Troubleshooting

The most common reason postings do not appear on GCEbb is that the sender's email address used doesn't match the one on the subscriber list - either because they are subscribed with a different address or not subscribed at all.

Other problems include being unable to subscribe or unsubscribe addresses, receiving multiple copies of the same posting, and receiving "out-of-office replies" in response to posting a message.

In all cases, if you are unable to resolve the problem yourself, please contact the GCEbb list owner (GCEBB-request@jiscmail.ac.uk).

Thank you CCP4bb!

The founding of the GCEbb list was inspired by the CCP4bb list, which has been fruitfully used by the macromolecular crystallography community for over 4 decades, and the information provided on this page was heavily based on the informational page about the CCP4bb.