News

The Grape Research Coordination Network (GRCN)-2013 meeting was held in UC Davis, from July9-12, 2013.  About 70 participants including scientists, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students attended this meeting.  Several groups in the grape community are generating high-throughput genomic data sets and need a bioinformatics infrastructure.  Several grape researchers use Gramene's genome portal, especially the grape genome browser and are very positive about the functionality of this portal. They view Gramene as a model database for organizing various genomic and genetic resources.

The Gramene Team is pleased to announce its release #38.  In collaboration with Ensembl Plants we are providing in this release:

Gramene currently hosts ten species-specific Pathways Databases; RiceCyc (Oryza sativa japonica), SorghumCyc (Sorghum bicolor), MaizeCyc (Zea mays), BrachyCyc (Brachypodium distachyon), AraCyc(Arabidopsis thaliana), MedicCyc(Medicago truncatula), PoplarCyc(Populus trichocarpa), CoffeaCyc(Coffea canephora), LycoCyc(Solanum lycopersicum

The BBSRC funded Wheat Improvement Strategic Programme (WISP) aims to identify new and useful genetic variation to support the vital contribution of wheat breeding to food security. The aim of this course is to offer training in the genetic analysis methodologies employed in WISP at the John Innes Centre. The participants will gain the skills necessary to apply these methodologies in their own research.

Gramene is looking forward to participating at the annual ASPB's Plant Biology meeting in the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence from July 20-24, 2013.  We invite the community of plant researchers and breeders to learn how to get the most out of our resources by joining the Genomic Tools mini-symposium, one of our posters (P25019 and P15030) or stop by the genomic resources Outreach Booth #200.  See you soon in the "Ocean state"!

Nearly half of the world's population acquires their staple calories from rice. While the Green revolution has witnessed substantial increases in the production, availability and global per capita consumption of rice, FAO estimates 870 million of the world population to be still hungry. To increase production and especially to alleviate effect of climate change on rice production it is imperative that rice breeding moves beyond the Green Revolution and incorporate modern genomics based methods.

Plant biologists looking for online, freely-available pathway resources that allow them to add, edit and download known and novel published pathways in plants have a new option: the WikiPathways Plants Portal (a collaboration between WikiPathways, the Jaiswal Lab at Oregon State University and the Gramene database).

The Gramene Team is pleased to announce its release #37.  In collaboration with Ensembl Plants we are providing in this release:

The DH Apple, Comice Pear, Sweet Cherry and Almond Genome project consortia have released the draft genome assemblies of the following four Rosaceae genomes this week:

Putative gene split models are available now for 23 plant reference genomes based on the latest Gramene release 36b (Gramene36bEnsembl70) hosted at Gramene. The split gene models are commonly related to an annotation artifact where a single gene is annotated as two or more genes due to incomplete evidence, but could also result from legitimate evolutionary processes. The Compara Gene Tree method predicts a special class of within-species paralogs called "contiguous_gene_split".