ORYZABASE--INTEGRATED MAP AND MUTANT DATABASE--

¹ National Institute of Genetics 1111 Yata, Mishima Shizuoka 411-8540 Japan

² Kyushu University 6-10-1�@Hakozaki Higashi-ku Fukuoka 812 Japan

³ University of Tokyo 111 Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku Tokyo 113-8657 Japan

Rice is the main diet crop in a half of the world. We have a long history of rice breeding and have a large collection of germplasms collected or developed by classical breeding and/or new biotechnological methods in Japan. Recent advances in genome science have made rice a model plant for research in molecular genetics especially of cereal genomes because of the relatively small genome size and the synteny across the major cereals. In order to compile accumulated knowledge of rice science as much as possible and facilitate a range of research activities, we are developing the rice database, called Oryzabase, which contains genetic resources stock information (>11000) including wild rice accessions (>3000), chromosome maps, trait gene information (>1000), mutant images (>70), references (>1100) and fundamental knowledge of rice genetics in collaboration with Japanese rice researchers. In this symposium we will focus on our new service of integration of different maps and the mutant database. The integrated maps have combined the classical linkage map of morphological/biochemical trait genes, the RFLP linkage, and physical map. There are marker genes assigned to the respective linkage groups so that if a researcher finds a certain marker on a certain map and then he/she can see the location of the marker relative to a common marker(s) between neighbor maps. The system provides Java-based good viewer to represent maps where some genes are linked to respective mutant images so that even a newcomer of rice science can see the mutants, which are rarely seen. We used an object-oriented database management system, ObjectStore, because of flexibility for data updating and extendibility. The database has also explored options to incorporate CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) into the schema in order to link the database with other pertaining applications in the future. The Oryzabase is available via Internet at http://www.shigen.nig.ac.jp/rice/rice.html.