Gramene at the 58th Maize Genetics Conference

Author: Yinping Jiao

The 58th Maize Genetics Conference was held at Jacksonville, FL on March 17-20, 2016. Gramene, the comparative database in plants, which hosts Maize as featured species presented a workshop for the maize community, including the announcement of the early release of Maize B73 RefGen_v4 http://maizev4.gramene.org/Zea_mays4m/Info/Index. The meeting brought about 600 maize researchers from around the world. Among those, about 60 meeting participants from Asia, Europe, and North America attended the Gramene workshop.

Dr. Doreen Ware, the PI of Gramene project, first gave an overview of Gramene’s comparative genomics and pathways resources, including the Ensembl genome browser, BLAST and BioMart. Our new search function, FTP data content, and various ways to contact the Gramene team were also highlighted. Dr. Yinping Jiao, a postdoc working in Gramene project, then presented the new Maize B73 RefGen_v4 genome browser, including the big improvement on assembly and annotation, how to search v3 gene ID in v4 and the features coming soon.

Aided by feedback from meeting participants, the Gramene team is planning many additional improvements to the maize browser as we look forward to next year’s meeting!

Note on sequence downloads: The sequence assembly in maizev4.gramene.org is a pre-publication release of the maize B73 RefGen_V4. In accordance with guidelines set forth by the Toronto agreement [Toronto International Data Release Workshop Authors. Prepublication data sharing. Nature. 2009 Sep 10;461(7261):168-70], direct sequence downloads from the genome browser had to be limited. _We are glad to provide individual users with specific sequences. Please submit your requests via our feedback form. We will provide the results in batch on a weekly basis. Thank you for your understanding.