April Batellite Follow Up:

Dear Bat1K community,

We were so pleased to meet with you all and hear the great ideas for bat genome related research that you discussed. There is so much that we can do with these amazing genomes to learn about the unique features, evolution and conservation of bats! We are very excited to help facilitate the formation of working groups moving forward.

In summary, we are aiming for a data freeze of genomes for later this year so we can all get started on creating some amazing science around these data. If there are additional data you feel are required or other genomes that we should include please get in touch with us.

Please now sign up to participate in the relevant working groups of your interest so we can make sure you are invited to the relevant meetings.

Each umbrella group is represented on a separate tab here (at the bottom of the document), and each working group in that tab is in its own column. You can sign up to be a part of as many working groups as you like, just add your name and email address in the relevant columns on each of the relevant tabs, name and email separated with a semi-colon (i.e.: “Meike Mai; bat1kconsortium@gmail.com”)

As we all discussed, we need 2-3 responsible individuals per working group to step forward to lead and organise these groups to help them move forward. We suggest that people lead no more than 2 groups maximum to prevent over commitment.

Responsible individuals must be willing to take on the following responsibilities:

-Organise regular meetings of the umbrella/working groups

-Reach out to the community to involve and invite relevant researchers

-Create and run Bat1k slack channels to coordinate communication (Meike can help with this)

-Assess and report on the data available and data needed

-Join the monthly Bat1k consortia level meetings to communicate with the wider group

You can volunteer to be a responsible individual for a working group by adding your name to the responsible individual cell in the spreadsheet. In the first meeting of the working groups, everyone should agree on who will take up this role based on these nominations.

Meike will be sending around monthly invites for consortium level batellite meetings that everyone is welcome to join so we can coordinate these efforts. The next Batellite is scheduled for May 25th, at 16:00 CEST.

We will also be in touch soon for updates on progress of the genomes and the data repository for sharing data pre-publication.

We welcome the contribution of any genomes that are at, or near, Bat1K standards (https://bat1k.com/access-policy/) and would like to hear of anything that is needed from the community to get and keep these projects moving.

Lastly, if you are attending the GBatNet meeting in Baltimore in May, please join David and Meike for the Bat1K lunch!

We are looking forward to working with you all and are extremely grateful for your contributions!

And to remind us all of what is possible, here is the cover of Science magazine published today with the zoonomia package and the question posed.. ”What can we do with a menagerie of mammal genomes?”

Imagine what we can do with a “bountiful of bats”

Let’s do some amazing science..

Best wishes,

Sonja, Emma, Meike and the whole Bat1K team

BAT1K Genome Consortium