1Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, 240 Emerson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA; 2Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Rd, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 11724, USA; 3Institute for Genomic Diversity, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA; 4USDA-ARS NAA Plant, Soil & Nutrition Laboratory Research Unit, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA
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 genetic and functional genomic information on rice and other grasses. Gramene's web interface provides information on rice and other grains, such as 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.
The database and the curated datasets are freely available for local use and installation. Quarterly releases provide researchers with new and up-to-date 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.