News

Two funding opportunities for US scientists to attend the 23rd International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR) at the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna, Austria on July 3-7 of 2012. The North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee (NAASC) applied for funding from the US National Science Foundation for:

1. Under-represented minorities, or faculty at minority-serving institutions/HBCUs (full funding)
2. early-career scientist travel grants ($1,000)

Application deadline: March 31, 2012.

Amit Dhingra has recently been awarded an NSF REU Site in Plant Genomics and Biotechnology to be hosted in the College of Agriculture, Human and Natural
Resource Sciences at Washington State University. Details about the research experience and online application are

Registration is now open for the Plant Biology 2012 meeting to be held July 22-24 in Austin, Texas.

The Gramene team is happy to announce interim release 34b.  We have now added the reference genome for Cyanidioschyzon merolae 10D, a primitive unicellular red alga, which lives in acidic hot water (like hot springs), bringing us to 23 genomes.  We updated the software of our Ensembl genome browser to version 65, updated the gene models for Physcomitrella patens (moss), updated the gene and prediction tables f

The 54th Annual Maize Genetics Conference will be held at the Doubletree Hotel in Portland, Oregon, from March 15-18, 2012. This year’s meeting will feature four plenary speakers: Bill Tracy (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison), Venkatesan Sundaresan (Univ. of California, Davis), Jenny Graves (Australian National University), and Thomas Dresselhaus (Univ. of Regensburg). Further details about the program, registration for meeting and housing, abstracts, and transportation are available at the meeting website.

On the morning of Sunday, February 5, 2012, the Plant Ontology Consortium will host a tutorial on bio-ontologies to take place at the New York Botanical Garden. Further details are available at bioontology.org.

Gramene will be present at next week's Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) XX meeting in San Diego, CA from January 14-18, 2012. On Tuesday, January 17, we will present a workshop from 3:50 PM-6:00 PM in the California Room. We will also participate in a Plant Genomics Outreach booth (#423) with other members of the plant community to answer your questions about furthering your research with our resources.

Responsibilities: Advances in biochemistry, metabolomics, and metabolic engineering, and the availability of genomic sequences for food crop species are opening new and valuable research opportunities for plant breeding. This molecular breeding position will have responsibility for conducting innovative research exploring genetic/epigenetic/quantitative variation in plants and the association with phenotypic variation in traits relating to human and animal health and nutrition made accessible by the latest technologies.

The developers of Flapjack have released a new version (1.11.12.13). Flapjack is a tool for visualizing genotypic and haplotype data that "can handle the large data volumes generated by high throughput SNP and comparable genotyping technologies." Gramene's diversity data sets are available in Flapjack format. We encourage you to extend your analysis of our data using tools like Flapjack.

The first draft of the pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) geneome of the variety ‘Asha’ was published last week in two separate but similar reports.