Gramene at the Maize Genetics Conference 2014

For the first time in the context of the Maize Genetics Conference (Beijing, China on March 13-16, 2014), Gramene seized the opportunity to present a workshop for the maize community. The meeting brought about 600 maize researchers from around the World. Among those, about 100 meeting participants from Asia, Europe, and North America attended the Gramene workshop. The workshop provided an overview of Gramene’s comparative genomics and variation resources, including the Ensembl genome browser, BLAST and BioMart. In addition, through videotutorials, we demonstrated with case studies the use of the above as well as visualization and mining tools for maize pathways, including the BioCyc databases and the Plant Reactome. Our Solr advanced query, FTP data content, and various ways to contact the Gramene Team were also highlighted. Other workshops offered during the meeting included Positional Cloning in maize, browsing the MaizeGDB website, and an overview and practical session for iPlant resources.

Plenary sessions at the conference included talks by Tom Brutnell and Toby Kellogg of the Danforth Plant Science Center on photosynthetic differentiation, and maize polyploidy respectively, Jiayang Li of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences on designing high-yield and good-quality rice, David Baulcombe of the University of Cambridge on hybrid plants, and Graeme Hammer of the University of Queensland on molecular breeding.

Silong Sung of China Agricultural University presented details of the Mo17 assembly in comparison with the B73 genome.

Rachel Egger of Stanford University’s presented her studies on gene expression progression in premeiotic maize anthers by analyzing their transcriptome and proteome. We were very pleased to see that she used MaizeCyc in her analyses. MaizeCyc was also referred in Raffaella Battaglia’s transcriptomics/metabolomics poster about breeding maize for resistance to Fusarium ear rot.

Doreen Ware, USDA-ARS scientist and principal investigator of the NSF-funded Gramene project, provided a broad overview of the ongoing research in her laboratory that focuses on maize and other crops, highlighting the progress on the maize v4 genome assembly and the groundwork for the maize pangenome (described in more detail in the poster by Yinping Jiao of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory).

The conference ended with a very interesting talk on genome instability presented by Jeff Bennetzen of the University of Georgia.