[TM4-Announce] Request for letters of Support for the MeV Renewal application

[Eleanor Howe]

Friends,

As many of you may know, the development of MeV has been supported by a
grant from the National Library of Medicine of the US National
Institutes of Health. This modest level of funding has allowed us to
support development of MeV through the addition of features and to
provide support to users who identify potential problems with the
software or who have specific needs for additions or extensions. I hope
that over the years MeV has been a useful tool supporting both your
research and your educational work and that you have found MeV to
something of value.

Our funding for MeV is slated to end in 2010 and so I am now preparing a
renewal application to request continued support for the MeV project.
The MeV team and I have been discussing what we would want to add as
part of our renewal proposal. We plan to continue adding features for
the analysis of array-based data, to provide support for integrated
analysis of multiple data types from the same sample (mRNA and miRNA;
mRNA expression and methylation; expression and CNV data, expression and
SNP profiles, for example), to provide better integration with genomic
resources (such as genome browsers), and to better integrate with
analytical tools from the BioConductor project and with utilities such
as Cytoscape. More importantly for many of you, we will propose to
expand our capabilities to sequence-based methods such as Digital Gene
Expression, RNA-Seq, and ChIP-Seq, to name a few examples.

And of course, we plan to continue to make MeV freely available as an
open-source project.

To do this, we need to demonstrate some tangible level of community
support for the project - beyond the more than 20,000 downloads in the
past year and the 821 citations of the initial paper describing the
software. And the most important way we can do that is through getting
letters of support from the community.

If you are able to support our project, I would greatly appreciate it if
you would send a brief letter (as a PDF) describing how MeV has helped
you in your research or teaching and expressing your enthusiasm for
continued funding.

To make this easy, I have taken the liberty of drafting a letter that
you can modify as you see fit. The draft can be found at
http://www.tm4.org/mev/request_for_letters.html.

Please send copies of your letters as PDFs directly to me at
johnq at jimmy.harvard.edu.

And thank you for your support!

John Quackenbush