Gramene is a curated, open-source, web-accessible data resource for comparative genome analysis in the grasses, with a focus on rice. The database provides agricultural researchers and plant breeders with invaluable biological and genomic information on rice and other grasses. Gramene's web interface provides information on genetic and physical maps, sequences, genes, proteins, genetic markers, mutants, QTLs, controlled vocabularies and publications and is accessed by researchers in over 100 countries around the world. In addition to curating publicly available data, Gramene focuses on developing information on QTL, markers and maps, and provides displays and tools that integrate these various types of information so the user may visually make comparisons between the genomes of grass species.
Online tutorials and help documents provide users with an overview of how to conduct a search within each database, as well as how to navigate the general website. Gramene staff also present workshops at conferences, or upon request, to train users in using the database. For timely answers to question users may use the "feedback" button at the top of any web-page.
Quarterly releases in January, April, July and October provide researchers with up-to-date and new information and tools. The Gramene project (www.gramene.org) is a collaborative effort between the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (www.cshl.edu), the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University (http://plbrgen.cals.cornell.edu/) and various national and international projects dedicated to cereal genomics and genetics research.