Education and outreach will be emphasized for broad dissemination of Axitinib Sigma progress in cephalopod genomics at multiple levels, including K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, and the public at large. Organizational Structure: Establishment of a Steering Committee was agreed upon at the May 2012 NESCent Catalysis Group Meeting. The composition of the committee was initially set at seven members, with broad international representation of cephalopod biologists, genomicists and bioinformaticians. The Committee will initially meet every 4 months, either in person, or remotely, or both. The Steering Committee is charged with providing international oversight of the community��s activities, fostering the free-flow of information among CephSeq Consortium members (see Data Sharing Plan), promoting collaborations, and ensuring that the CephSeq Consortium remains focused on the Mission Statement objectives set forth above.

The Steering Committee will also work to facilitate community-wide efforts to annotate assembled genomes. The tenure of the Committee will initially be two years, and any and all cephalopod researchers are encouraged to contact the Committee about the changing needs of the community. The inaugural members are: Laure Bonnaud (Univ. Paris, France), C. Titus Brown (Michigan State Univ., USA), Roger Hanlon (Marine Biological Laboratory, USA), Atsushi Ogura (Ochanomizu Univ., Japan), Clifton Ragsdale/Chair (Univ. Chicago, USA), Jan Strugnell (La Trobe Univ., Australia) and Guojie Zhang (BGI, China). A web site [80] will serve as a point of contact for the worldwide community.

An auxiliary site for sharing cephalopod genomic and transcriptomic data is to be established within the next six months (see Data Sharing Plan). The CephSeq Consortium will coordinate internationally with the Cephalopod International Advisory Council (CIAC) [81] and with the newly established CephRes-Associazione Cephalopod Research-ONLUS [82], which is Dacomitinib based in Europe. Workshops will be organized annually to ensure coordinated and cooperative progress in genomics on an international scale. One likely venue for such workshops would be society meetings, such as the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). The Steering Committee urges scientists who support the goals of this white paper to join the consortium by signing the white paper and participating in the activities of the consortium. Broader impacts A specific recommendation of this white paper is to compete for a Research Coordination Network (RCN) grant from the NSF.