PAG meeting 2020 notes and a user survey

The recent 2020 Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) Conference, held in Town & Country Resort, San Diego, brought together over 3,000 leading researchers, scientists, software professional, and students working in plant and animal genomics research, over 135 exhibits, 180 workshops, 1,200 posters, over 2,500 abstracts and 7 Plenary talks.

Doreen Ware, Pankaj Jaiswal and Sushma Naithani represented Gramene knowledgebase in thee PAG 2020 meeting. The Gramene workshop "Unifying Comparative Genomics and Pathway Resources for Plant Communities" on Tuesday, January 14, 2020, featured an array of exciting talks from experts. Doreen Ware (PI: NSF-funded Gramene project) announced Gramene's public release #62 containing updates to its Genome section, Pathway portal Plant Reactome, and infrastructure. The genome portal hosts 67 plant genomes with six new species and the Plant Reactome hosts pathways for 97 species. Pankaj Jaiswal (Co-PI Gramene project) provided updates on Gramene's plant pathway portal, Plant Reactome and demonstrated use case studies on how genomics researchers, as well as plant breeders, can utilize this resource. Six invited speakers presented interesting talks:

1. Nancy George (EMBL-EBI, UK): Single Cell RNA-Sequencing in Plants: EMBL-EBI's Resources for Data Submission, Archival, and Visualization.

2. Zhanguo Xin (USDA-ARS, LUBBOCK, TX): NGS-Enabled Fast Gene Discovery from Sorghum Pedigreed Mutant Library.

3. Shujun Ou (Iowa State University, Ames, IA): Effect of Sequence Depth and Length in Long-Read Assembly of the Maize Inbred NC358.

4. Rebecca L. Seipelt-Thiemann (Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN): Investigating the Maize Genome with Undergraduate Researchers.

5. Liya Wang (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY): Accessing MaizeCode Data from Gramene and Sciapps.

6. Andrea Braeutigam (Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany): Gene Regulatory Network Construction Based on Machine Learning Enables Phylogenetic Comparisons in the Monocots.

Gramene staff Pankaj Jaiswal and Sushma Naithani represented Gramene in the AgBioData Consortium booth exhibit that consists of a collaborative effort of over 20 bioinformatics resources (https://www.agbiodata.org) and provides a platform for one-to-one interactions between various database curators/scientists and users. 

Others workshops where Gramene folks presented:

  • Doreen Ware gave a talk on Gramene in the WheatIS EWG annual meeting held on Saturday, Jan 11, 2020. 
  • Pankaj Jaiswal co-conducted Genome to Phenome: Next Generation Sensors for Sensing Plants and Environment on Sunday, Jan 12.
  • Sushma Naithani & Pankaj Jaiswal organized Systems Biology and Ontologies workshop on Tuesday, Jan 14, 2020. 
  • Doreen Ware also gave a talk entitled  "Enriching Lives Through Genomic Innovations"  in the workshop 'Moving from a Single Genome to Population-Based References Assemblies of Plants'  organized by Corteva Agriscience.
We Reaching out to the plant community to learn about your needs and preferences for genomics data, resources & #bioinformatics tools. #plantgenomes #pathway #genesWe are thankful to Gramene users who provided feedback on our survey.  We encourage our users to provide online feedback on this survey and help us to improve this community resource.
 
Provide your inputs at https://beav.es/ZCR
 
Please also ask members of your lab to provide feedback if they are using Gramene for their research.
 

The Gramene Team www.gramene.org