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The Plant Ontology Consortium (www.plantontology.org) is seeking applicants for a full-time position of scientific curator who will coordinate the Consortium’s efforts. The Plant Ontology Consortium is a collaboration among researchers at Oregon State University, Cornell University and New York Botanical Garden. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

A new and improved Gramene Genetic Diversity website was rolled out today. The major goal of the overhaul was to increase database browsability, which the new 'Database summary' table achieves nicely by offering an overview of data for each species as well as hyperlinks to the data sets themselves. Also new is an area called 'Basic Search' where we will be creating guided searches in order to expand the search options available to users.

Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate program of the Oregon State University (OSU) is organizing a Bioinformatics, Genomics and Systems Biology symposium and workshop on June 17-18, 2009. Researchers, students and postdocs living in and/or visiting the area are invited to attend the workshop. Follow the workshop link http://mcbworkshop.cgrb.oregonstate.edu for more details.

The USDA, Agricultural Research Service, Plant Science Research Unit in St. Paul, Minnesota is seeking a POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, (Research Geneticist Plants) for a TWO YEAR APPOINTMENT (the appointment may be extended up to a total of 4years without further competition).  Ph.D. is required. Salary is commensurate with experience ($59,631 - $77,515 per annum) plus benefits.  Citizenship restrictions apply.

Visit the Iowa Farmer Today's CornCam to see a live cornfield in Iowa.

The Sixth International Rice Genetics Symposium will be held in conjunction with the 7th International Symposium on Rice Functional Genomics November 15-19, 2009 in Manila. This event provides an important forum for reviewing the latest advances in rice research, how recent breakthroughs could affect global food security, and in-depth discussion and exchange of information on classical genetics and genomics.

From October 13th to 19th, 2009, Cold Spring Harbor Lab will host a workshop on cereal genomics. The workshop will feature morning and evening lectures with afternoon computer lab exercises. The workshop will also provide hands-on lab work in the comparative anatomy, phenotype and QTL sections in which participants will examine samples and make measurements for statistical analysis to illustrate the power of maize genetics and its relation to genomics. The application deadline is July 15, 2009.

A paper entitled "Gramene QTL database: development, content and applications" has been published in Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation. This paper "describe[s] the development of a quantitative trait loci (QTL) database and illustrate how it can be used to facilitate both the forward and reverse genetics research."

The Gramene database project team is happy to announce beta release of the  PlantGeneWiki. It is designed as an online community portal on plant genes and their annotations. Our goal for PlantGeneWiki is to generate community curated/annotated pages where the researchers can browse, search, read and manage the content by editing.

The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is excited to announce the release #0409 (April 2009) of the Plant Ontology Database.

In this release, we bring you 26,625 gene annotations from TAIR, Gramene, SGN and MaizeGDB; 8,558 QTL annotations from Gramene; and 9,832 germplasm associations from SGN, MaizeGDB and NASC.

Many new annotations were added including 16,016 gene annotations from TAIR, 3 gene annotations from Gramene, 2 gene annotations from SGN, and 3,928 germplasm annotations from MaizeGDB.