News

Gramene will be present at the Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) conference in San Diego, California, from January 9-14.

The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UMass Amherst announces a faculty search for a plant biochemist/ molecular biologist (tenure track Assistant Professor). They are particularly interested in recruiting a plant biochemist who will complement the research strengths of the department and who will contribute to campus initiatives in biofuels research. Massachusetts and the UMass campus are making significant investments to expand the life sciences on campus, including two new laboratory science buildings that will be completed in the next two years.

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Undergraduates interested in applying their quantitative science or biology background to problems in plant biology are invited to a 2010 summer research opportunity. The iPlant Collaborative is supporting an Interdisciplinary Computational Thinking and Plant Biology Research Program for Undergraduates (Interdisciplinary UBRP-CT). This is a 12 week paid summer research experience (roughly $300/week) with many additional enrichment activities (more info).

RosBREED project is seeking a cadre of tomorrow’s leaders to join their team on an exciting new “science to the marketplace” federally funded project. “RosBREED: Enabling Marker-Assisted Breeding in Rosaceae” is a four-year trans-disciplinary project focused on rosaceous crops (apple, cherry, peach, and strawberry) involving 12 U.S. research institutions, international collaborators, and private sector participants.

Fahlgren, et al. recently reported an annotation pipeline called  Cache ASsisted Hash Search with Xor logic (CASHX) in the journal RNA (PubMed ID 19307293). The pipeline can map, quantify and manage large quantities of sequence data. The sequence alignments can be done using any size of DNA sequence data for both query sequences and database.

In order to facilitate the community curation of Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL), the Gramene team has published a proposed QTL load file format and instructions for submitting new QTL to Gramene for inclusion in our QTL database and comparative maps. If you have any questions or comments about this proposal, please write gramene@gramene.org.

The genome sequencing of Papaya variety called SunUp was reported recently by Ming et al. Nature. 2008 Apr 24;452(7190):991-6 (PMID: 18432245). SunUp was also the first commercial virus-resistant transgenic fruit tree.

The genome (DNA content) of one of the most commonly found ingredient in your salad, the cucumber (Cucumis sativus var. sativus L.), has been sequenced. A report was published in Nature Genetics on November 1, 2009, (PubMed ID 19881527) by the authors Huang, et al., on sequencing the "Chinese long" inbred line 9930 of the cucumber. Their study revealed that five of its seven chromosomes show fusions of ten ancestral chromosomes after divergence from Cucumis melo.

Dr. Pamela Ronald (UC Davis) recently "posted a time-lapse video (4 months) showing the performance of a genetically improved rice in a flooded field plot at the International Rice Research Institute" that we thought would be interesting to share. For a complete description of the "submergence tolerance (Sub1) rice," please see her blog.