Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

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

Genomes And Phenomes, What Do Rice, Maize, Millet And Wheat Have In Common?

Doreen Ware^{1, 2} , Pankaj Jaiswal³ , Susan McCouch³ , Lincoln Stein¹ , Edward Buckler^{2, 4} , JunJian Ni³ , Immanuel Yap³ , Ken Youens-Clark ¹ , Kiran Kumar¹ , Liya Ren¹ , Steven Schmidt¹ , William Spooner¹ , Wei Zhao¹

¹  Cold Spring Harbor Labs, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724

²  USDA-ARS NAA Plant, Soil & Nutrition Laboratory Research Unit US Plant, Soil & Nutrition Laboratory, Tower Road, Ithaca, NY 14853-2901

³  Department of Plant Breeding, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

⁴  Institute for Genomic Diversity, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

To improve crop performance, plant breeders and researchers need an understanding of the structure of plant genomes and the genes found within them as well as how these are related to phenotypes. The size and complexity of most cereal genomes make it inherently difficult to produce finished genomes, especially for large genomes such as wheat and maize which are likely to be presented in varying states. Leveraging the known synteny and draft sequence of rice for grasses will accelerate the associations of genes and traits. Gramene is a resource for comparative plant genomics that has established several resources to facilitate sequence and phenotype associations between rice and other cereals. It includes a rice genome browser, comparative maps viewer, QTL and mutant browser, and the use of controlled vocabularies to describe gene products, phenotypes, as well as their associated plant anatomy parts and growth stages.