Here at TDI (http://www.tropicaldisease.org and http://thesynapticleap.org/malaria/) have gone through some exciting and substantial changes. Most of the changes went unnoticed in the mailing list (tdi-discuss@tropicaldisease.org) for several reasons including the fact that the software that controls the mailing list was not working for a while. We apology for it. However, I am happy to inform you of those changes and  hope that your interest in the TDI has not diminished. 

Here are the news:

- TDI has partnership with "The Synaptic Leap" (TSL, a non-profit organization) for the development of our portals to the community. They people behind TSL are professionals of portal development for communities (read more here http://thesynapticleap.org) and they make a superb contribution to TDI. TDI and TSL have decided to take the "Malaria community" as an initial pilot project to see what are the needs of such communities or researchers. TDI and TSL will be extending to new communities covering other tropical diseases or areas in the future.

- The Malaria community at TSL has already some projects that are active or in development (http://thesynapticleap.org/malaria/?q=projects). We highly encourage your involvement or use on those projects to make a contribution to the community. Please, take a moment to register in TSL (http://thesynapticleap.org/malaria/?q=user/register) and start posting your comments in the discussion forum, create your blog or simply keep up-to-date with the development of the projects in malaria (or future ones in other diseases). We believe that this new venue is more powerful than the discussion-forum we had so far.

- We would really like to see some active and vivid (malaria) community in TSL. For that, we encourage you to discuss possible future projects to be implemented in TDI/TSL by posting your comments in the discussion forum for projects (http://thesynapticleap.org/malaria/?q=node/23). As example of a project, some member of the community could start a project for finding ALL proteases in the malaria genome. One could use the GeneCard project (http://thesynapticleap.org/malaria/?q=projects/GC which will be activated before the end of the month) to find for what is known in the malaria genome and do an initial search on the remaining hypothetical or non-annotated genes in the search for new proteases. The personal blogs, discussion forums and the Gene Annotation project (http://thesynapticleap.org/malaria/?q=projects/GA which will be activated in early 2006) would be the best place to exchange the results of such search with the rest of the community. This global collaboration will help the  goal of fast and reliable analysis of the data produced in the project. 

Do not forget to visit the news pages of TDI (http://www.tropicaldisease.org/?page=news) and TSL (http://thesynapticleap.org/malaria/?q=news) for more info.

Thanks to all for your participation in the TDI!

Marc