admin's blog

A paper in this week's issue of Nature announces the completion of the sequencing of the genome of Sorghum bicolor. This is only the second cereal species (after rice) to have been completely sequenced. Most notably, sorghum uses the C4 photosynthetic pathway in contrast to rice, which uses the C3 pathway. The C4 pathway is more efficient in fixing carbon dioxide under high temperature and light intensity.

For more information, see the full article.

The International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP) has released an updated genome sequence for Oryza sativa cv. Nipponbare. More information can be found at the release announcement for IRGSP Build5.

The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines is currently recruiting internationally for nine important positions. For more information, see their jobs page.

Gramene is pleased to be at the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, January 10-14, 2009. Visit us at the following events:

Gramene would like to highlight a new to a Wiki site that describes a summary of a recent workshop entitled:

"The National Plant Genome Initiative at Ten Years: A Community Workshop"

This site contains information (agenda, Rapporteur's summaries, session/Q&A notes, list of meeting participants and a meeting summary) related to the recent National Plant Genome Initiative Workshop held at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Conference Center of the National Academies in Irvine California on August 26-28, 2008.

The 51st Annual Maize Genetics Conference will be held March 12-15, 2009 in Pheasant Run, St. Charles, Illinois. Abstracts are due January 30. For more information, please consult their website.

The International Conference on Heterosis in Plants: Genetics and molecular causes and optimal exploitation in breeding, will be held September 7 to 9, 2009 at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. For more information, please see their website.

The Gramene team is making an interim release of our comparative maps database (CMap) which restores previously available 12 "stacked" maps from the Oryza Mapping Alignment Project (OMAP). These maps order and orient the best selection of FPC contigs for each species as compared to Gramene's annotated version of the TIGR rice assembly.

On Friday, January 30, 2009, the Pacific Northwest Wheat Quality Council meeting will be held in Sacramento, California.  Sponsored by the National Barley Foods Council, the Forum will spotlight breeding and research developments for food barley and will address the unique opportunities and challenges facing the future of new barley foods production and consumption.  For more information, please contact Mary Palmer Sullivan.

Gramene offers a public, read-only MySQL server for many of our databases
including all of our Ensembl databases and our markers and sequence
database. You can connect to the host "gramenedb.gramene.org," with
the password "gramene," e.g.:

mysql -hgramenedb.gramene.org -pgramene