Plant & Animal Genomes XVIII Conference

January 9-13, 2010
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Gramene: A Resource For Comparative Grass Genomics

Immanuel V Yap¹ , Shulamit Avraham² , Ed Buckler^3,4 , Terry Casstevens² , Charles Chen¹ , Genevieve DeClerck¹ , Palitha Dharmawardhana⁵ , Pankaj Jaiswal⁵ , Susan R McCouch¹ , Liya Ren² , Will Spooner² , Jim Thomason² , Chih-Wei Tung¹ , Doreen Ware^2,4 , Sharon Wei² , Ken Youens-Clark²

¹  Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, 240 Emerson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

²  Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Rd, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 11724, USA

³  Institute for Genomic Diversity, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

⁴  USDA-ARS NAA Plant, Soil & Nutrition Laboratory Research Unit, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

⁵  Dept of Botany and Plant Pathology, 3082 Cordley Hall, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA

Gramene (www.gramene.org) is a curated data resource for comparative genome analysis in grasses and other plants. The database integrates information about genomic sequence, genes, proteins, biochemical pathways, maps and markers, QTL, germplasm, and genetic and phenotypic diversity. To index and associate these different data types, Gramene makes extensive use of ontologies (controlled vocabularies); these include ontologies for plant structures and growth stages, traits and phenotypes, gene function, biological processes, cellular components, and environments. Online tutorials and help documents provide users with an overview of how to conduct a wide variety of operations on the database. The website averages more than 650 visits/day from all over the world. All data in Gramene is publicly-available and all code is open source. The database is updated semi-annually. Gramene is supported by a grant from the NSF and represents a collaborative effort between Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University and various national and international projects dedicated to cereal genomics and genetics research.