[TM4-Announce] Request for letters of support

[Announcements for the TM4 Microarray Software Suite (http://www.tm4.org/)]

Friends,

Just a reminder and a request. The grant that supports MeV is up for
renewal. One of the things that helped us in our application for funding
four years ago was a list of more than 100 supporting letters. We
currently have slightly more than 50 and need to get another 50 before
early next week if we are going to be able to include this in the
application.

I've included a draft letter below which you can modify (and I encourage
you to do this) to reflect how you use MeV and the impact it has had on
your research or teaching.

If you could send me a copy (mailto:johnq at jimmy.harvard.edu) as a PDF on
your institutional letterhead, I would appreciate it immensely.

Thank you in advance for your help.

JQ


John Quackenbush
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
44 Binney Street, Sm822
Boston, MA 02115

[DATE]

Dear Dr. Quackenbush,

I want to begin by thanking you and your team for supplying the research
community with MeV. This software is outstanding, providing professional
quality research tools in a user-friendly package at absolutely no cost
and with no restrictions on its use. MeV has been extremely important in
our research and has allowed us to [EXAMPLE].

Further, MeV has become an important part of our educational mission. I
use it regularly in teaching the basics of microarray analysis to my
students. It is easy to use, easy to learn, and the documentation and
example datasets you provide are outstanding starting points for our
students to learn about genomic methods and their applications.

I understand that your existing funding to support development of MeV is
scheduled to end in 2010 and that you are currently preparing a renewal
application to continue funding into the future. Your plans to extend
MeV to deal more effectively with large datasets, to better accommodate
SNP, CNV, and ChIP, and other new data types, and to deal with
sequence-based genomic assays ranging from Digital Gene Expression and
RNA-Seq to ChIP-Seq and beyond are the types of additions that I too
believe are essential for future biomedical research. The combination of
these proposed additions with MeV’s intuitive interface, the new
displays you are proposing to incorporate, integration with other tools
such as Cytoscape and the BioConductor utilities, and outstanding data
integration methods you are building will guarantee that MeV is an
essential research tool and an asset to a wide range of planned and
ongoing research projects.

As a member of the large (and still growing) community of MeV users, I
fully support your application and I hope that the NIH sees the value in
continuing so support this important research resource. Best of luck
with your application.

Sincerely,
[Your name and titles]