Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Annotation Of The Rice Genome At TIGR

C. Robin Buell , Brian Haas , Charles Lu , Rama Maiti , Shu Ouyang , Aihui Wang , Jennifer Wortman , Qiaoping Yuan , Wei Zhu

  The Institute for Genomic Research, 9712 Medical Center Dr, Rockville MD 20850 USA

We have been funded by the National Science Foundation to annotate the rice genome. We have created an annotation database for rice that houses sequence and annotation information. We have identified gene models in rice using a combination of ab initio gene finders and experimental evidence. We have constructed pseudomolecules of the 12 rice chromosomes and provided these, along with our annotation, as a public resource for rice and cereal biologists. We have been performing assessments and improvements to our annotation pipeline to refine the quality of annotation. We have incorporated full length cDNA and EST evidence into gene models and improved our gene name assignment methods. We generated a series of other annotations for the rice genome including gene ontology assignments, domains, motifs, and alignment with tagged insertion sequences. We have also developed a series of alignments with other plant species including alignments with ESTs and with genetic markers from maize and wheat. We are on track to update our annotation to incorporate more finished sequence from the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project and our improved annotation methodologies by January 2005. All of our data are available via the project website: rice.tigr.org.