Plant Genome III Conference

PLANT GENOME DATABASES FROM THE USDA: SOLGENES AND RICEGENES AS EXAMPLES

As part of the USDA Plant Genome Research Program, a number of species-specific genome databases a-re being constructed. These databases are each curated by an expert Principal Investigator at various institutions around the U.S., in most cases using the UNIX ACEDB software. They are publicly accessible from the National Agricultural Library via the Internet through a variety of interfaces: anonymous ftp of the ACEDB versions from probe.nalusda.gov, a Gopher server at the same address, a World Wide Web gateway located at http://probe.nalusda.gov:8000, and an e-mail query system from waismail@probe.nalusda.gov. The USDA/NAL has also released a CD- ROM containing all of the USDA funded genome databases, to allow non-Internet sites to access the information as well. The goal of the database projects is to promote the utilization and dissemination of the results of genome research in a multidisciplinary format. The SolGenes (Solanaceae) database is an example of a multispecies database, containing genetic maps of tomato, potato and pepper. There is detailed information on over 950 DNA probes and over 2400 tomato accessions. RiceGenes has extensive information on the banding patterns and molecular weights produced by hybridization of 150 publicly available probes to a broad sample of 150 rice accessions. An additional 500 probes are also documented in the database. Both projects actively solicit the contribution of data from researchers around the world, and both are currently working with a number of national and international collaborators.