News

The 19th International Triticeae Mapping Initiative - 3rd COST Tritigen joint meeting 2009 will be held in Clermont-Ferrand, France, August 31th - September 4th 2009. Abstract submission deadline is Friday, March 20, 2009. Please see their submission form online for more information.

Members of the Gramene team (Doreen Ware and Genevieve DeClerck) will be attending this week's 51st Annual Maize Genetics Conference in St. Charles, IL, March 12-15, and will present two posters: 1) "Gramene: A Resource for Comparative Grass Genomics", 2) "The Gramene Genetic Diversity module: A resource for comparative genome analysis in plants."

The Gramene team has released a new public, read-only Wiki for our documentation at http://docs.gramene.org. We expect to use this site to better explain our processes for acquiring, processing and presenting our data.

Members of the Gramene team will be presenting posters at this week's Plant Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Our posters include "Plant comparative genomics at Gramene" (Will Spooner) and "An update on the Gramene database" (Ken Youens-Clark).

The Gramene team is happy to announce the release of our 29th build. We have upgraded our Ensembl genome browser to version 52 and added or updated six genomes (Arabidopsis lyrata, Vitisvinifera [grape], Populus trichocarpa [poplar], Sorghum bicolor, Oryza glaberrima short arm, Arabidosis thaliana updated to TAIR8). We feature new mappings of selected plant sequences to our 9 sequenced genomes and a reorganization of the cereal alignment contigview tracks as well as the results of our new whole genome alignments from Ensembl's blastz-chain-net pipeline.

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.