RICEGENES - PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

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

The RiceGenes database has been available for public access since 1993 and from its inception has used the ACEDB database software. This is the ninth release and is the third release using the ACEDB version 4.5 software. This latest release reflects a dramatic increase in the amount of sequence data. There has also been a large increase in the number of curated rice and maize QTL studies, with the QTL display integrated into the comparative maps display so that genes/QTLs associated with putative function in different cereals can be readily visualized in relation to regions of synteny among grass species. A comparative map of Zizania palustris (wild rice) has been added to the comparative mapping section of RiceGenes, and for the first time, a physical map of rice has been added based on the chromosomal maps published by the Japanese Rice Genome Project. The database currently contains information on about 1,200 different rice varieties (300 of which have molecular profiling data), 100 rice variety releases, 9 genetic maps of rice, 1 YAC based physical map of rice, 4 comparative maps of rice (with wild rice, maize, oat and the Triticeae), over 30,000 rice sequences and their most significant BLAST hits, and over 1000 QTL (including approximately 175 maize QTL). Future plans include the addition of a BAC-based physical map as these data become available and further development of the physical mapping display so that it can be integrated with information about genes/QTLs and synteny. RiceGenes is available through anonymous ftp from the National Agricultural Library (probe.nalusda.gov), from the National Center for Biotechnology Information at ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/repository, on the WWW through the Webace interface provided by the USDA/National Agricultural Library (http://probe.nalusda.gov:8300) and via the webace2 interface at Cornell University (http://geneous.cit.cornell.edu). In addition to the WWW versions of ACEDB 4.5, UNIX, Macintosh and Windows 95/NT platforms are supported. To learn more about RiceGenes please contact Marci Blinstrub, mab8@cornell.edu.