News

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.

Visit the Louisiana State University AgCenter Rice Cam to view rice growing in the field. This year, the field is planted to the variety Jazzman, a new specialty variety with aroma and cooking characteristics very similar to Jasmine type varieties grown in Thailand. There is also a related blog.

In Gramene's build latest build 29 release, our Ensembl genome browser was upgrade to version 52. There are many differences from the previous version, so our users will probably find Ensembl's help documents useful, particularly the video tutorials.

The Asian Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC2010) will be held in Bangalore, India, January 18-21, 2010. This an annual forum for exploring research, development and novel applications of bioinformatics. For more details, please visit the National Centre for Biological Sciences website.

A hands-on wheat genome annotation workshop for graduate students and postdocs will be held from June 29th to July 1st, 2009 at the Institute for Genome Sciences, (UM Baltimore) as the outreach component of the NSF-funded project DBI-0638558. On-line registration open until April 15th 2009. More information can be found in the attached flyer and at http://www.igs.umaryland.edu/wheat/cgi.

A new journal, the Journal of Plant Breeding and Crop Science (JPBCS) is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal published monthly dedicated to increasing the depth of Crop Science across disciplines with the ultimate aim of improving plant research. JPBCS will cover all areas of plant breeding and crop science. The journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence, and will publish: