News

EPIC, the Epigenomics of Plants International Consortium, is a new initiative supporting the efforts of the international community studying epigenomics and epigenetics in plants. EPIC is currently funded by a research collaborative network grant from the NSF. The goal of EPIC is to identify key intellectual questions, potentially transformative methodologies, as well as training and infrastructure needs of the epigenomics community and then communicate these to international funding agencies in order to establish a coordinated plant epigenomics initiative.

A story in today's NZ Herald reports that Pepsi is moving to bottle their drinks in a new plastic derived from plants rather than petroleum. "The bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials," reports the story.

The USDA-ARS R.W. Holley Center for Agriculture and Health in Ithaca, NY, on the campus of Cornell University seeks a database programmer to support the database and bioinformatics component of the Triticeae Coordinated Agricultural Project. The overall project is a five-year, $25 million effort to accelerate the improvement of wheat and barley for performance under stress from climate change. Over $1.5 million will be spent adding functionality to a dedicated relational database, “the triticeae toolbox” or T3, for public-sector breeding of wheat, barley, and oat (http://triticeaetoolbox.org).

A postdoctoral Computational Biologist position is available immediately at Cornell University in the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics. This position serves to support the database and bioinformatics component of the Triticeae Coordinated Agricultural Project (TCAP). The overall project is a five-year, $25 million effort to accelerate the improvement of wheat and barley for performance under stress from climate change.

Many members of the Gramene team will be present at the upcoming 19th Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, CA, January 15-19, 2011. We will be giving a demonstration of the database on Tuesday, January 18, from 3:50 PM - 6:00 PM called "Using Gramene: A Genomics and Genetics Resource for Rice and other Grasses" (C905) where we will demonstrate basic and advanced use of the website. Members will also be presenting the following posters:

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The Gramene team is happy to announce the release of our 32nd build. This release includes the first inclusion of the moss Physcomitrella patens in our Ensembl genome browser which itself is running on the latest version 60. Also new are the chromosome 3 short arms of Oryza nivara and O. rufipogon.

Gramene is happy to announce the publication of an update on the site in Nucleic Acids Research. This is an open-access article, so please see the publisher's website for the full text.

Gramene is happy to offer a new data set in our BioMart for variation data. This is a mirror of the data at Ensembl Plants and holds SNPs from Oryza sativa indica, O. sativa japonica, Vitis vinifera, and Arabidopsis thaliana.