News

The Gramene team is happy to announce the 34th major release of the site. In our Ensembl genome browser, six genomes have been updated and we have added Glycine max (soybean), Selaginella moellendorffii, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii bringing us to 22 genomes.

We are pleased to announce the release of the BrachyCyc database. Developed by the Gramene database project, BrachyCyc is a catalog of predicted metabolic pathways from Brachypodium distachyon. Pathways and genes presented in this catalog are primarily based on the annotations carried out by Gramene on the version 1.2 of the gene models and release 1.0 of the Brachypodium distachyon inbred line Bd21 genome. The database was created using the Pathway Tools PathoLogic module developed by Peter D.

Gramene members contributed to a new paper entitled "QlicRice: a web interface for abiotic stress responsive QTL and loci interaction channels in rice in the journal Database. "The QlicRice database is designed to host publicly accessible, abiotic stress responsive quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in rice (Oryza sativa) and their corresponding sequenced gene loci." You can try out the new interface.

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.