News

Gramene was happy to contribute to a recently published paper entitled "BioMart Central Portal: an open database network for the biological community." Gramene's BioMart installation is a resource for our users to download plant sequences, QTLs, variations, markers, and more.

To facilitate collaborative international research in the area of rice genetics and genomics, funds have been granted from USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to support the participation of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty from the USA to attend the 9th International Symposium of Rice Functional Genomics (ISRFG 9) which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan on November 7-9, 2011.

UniProtKB-GOA are pleased to announce the inclusion in their database of electronic GO annotations created by EnsemblPlants/Gramene. The annotations are created by projection of GO annotations from Arabidopsis thaliana or Oryza sativa proteins onto proteins from one or more target species based on gene orthology obtained from Ensembl Compara.

Several members of Gramene will be attending the Plant Biology 2011 meeting August 6-10, 2011 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On Monday, August 8, we will be hosting a workshop entitled "Building Community Curation: Come curate your favorite genes, phenotypes and pathway" in Auditorium 1 from 7:30-10:30PM. If you wish to attend, please note that you will need to reserve a ticket ahead of time.

We are pleased to announce the release of the MaizeCyc database version 2.0 (official release). MaizeCyc is accessible from the following mirror sites:

Pankaj Jaiswal, co-PI of the Gramene project, is currently at the XVIII International Botanical Congress's meeting in Melbourne, Australia, where he will be presenting a talk entitled "The past, present and future: ontologies for plant biology" (Symposium #Sym048) on July 28, 2011. He is also presenting an e-poster on "Plant Comparative Genomics Tools from the Gramene Database."

Doreen Ware, co-PI on the Gramene project, will be attending the Gordon Plant Metabolic Engineering Conference in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, to deliver a talk entitled "The DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (Kbase) for Energy and the Environment" on Wednesday, July 27, from 11:20 - 11:55 AM.

The European Brachypodium Workshop will be held at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Versailles, France October 19-21, 2011. The meeting will be devoted to the use of Brachypodium in plant biology as a model for grasses. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the Brachypodium community but also researchers interested in comparative genomics.

Joshua Stein speaking at the Arabidopsis 2011 meeting.Josh, Doreen and Pankaj enjoyed their time at the ICAR meeting last week in Madison. Our workshop was well-attended, and they had a chance to meet with many researchers at our booth to describe the resources Gramene can offer to the Arabidopsis community. We have posted all the presentation and workshop materials on our outreach website.

We have created a new video tutorial describing how to perform MLM analysis using the Tassel tool. For more tutorials, please see our website.