Use of the Mycology Newsgroup

[Robert Brambl]

Hello, All:

With respect to recent discussions about shared use of this group by  
mushroom aficionados and the research community, I think that the  
researchers certainly could benefit from the support and interests of the  
professional and amateur mycologists.  Furthermore, there may well be  
enough overlapping interests of individuals in the two groups to justify  
continued joint use of the same newsgroup. When the molbio.yeast subgroup  
was begun two or three years ago, the discussion initially was dominated  
by home brewers and amateur oenologists. Then things got dull :)

Why the apparent light traffic among researchers in this group?  It has  
been my experience (and others') that a posted query here brings many  
helpful replies, but they are directed to the poster and not to the group.   
This suggests, therefore, that most people participate in this group via  
mail, rather than through a newsreader where it may be much easier to post  
a public followup to others' messages.  Perhaps people using e-mail should  
be reminded of an address for this group where their followups can be  
posted. The moderators could prepare a standard message to be issued once  
a month or so to instruct users about how and why to post to the entire  
group. There have been queries about promoters, transformation procedures  
and problems, etc., that I would have been interested in following, but  
the replies apparently were made privately.

I think that the Adams/May/Ellis suggestion of posting abstracts and  
publication information of research articles would be an excellent use of  
this group. It would be an easy way to learn about diverse areas that  
ordinarily we pay too little attention to, as well as to introduce  
ourselves to each other. A number of years ago, when NIH had money, it  
reprinted and distributed preprints of entire research articles in  
molecular biology to NIH-funded laboratories. One or twice a week a large  
package would arrive, containing fresh manuscripts that would not  
otherwise be in print for months. This newsgroup could help recreate this  
earlier prepublication distribution, so that the posting of an abstract of  
interest could lead readers to contact its author(s) for more information  
far in advance of its arrival in print. Finally, it would provide all of  
us with another device in our efforts to stay up with literature that we  
ought to know about.  

Just to get things started, could the moderators of this group invite  
submission of abstracts from members of this group that have been or will  
be published in 1994? 

Best wishes.

Bob

Robert Brambl
University of Minnesota
brambl at molbio.cbs.umn.edu