We have been funded by the National Science Foundation to annotate the rice genome. A summary of the project and its goals are listed below.

Rice is a model species for the monocotyledonous plants and the cereals which are the greatest source of food for the world's population. While rice genome sequence is available through multiple sequencing projects, high quality, uniform annotation is required in order for genome sequence data to be fully utilized by researchers. The existence of a common gene set and uniform annotation allows researchers within the rice community to work from a common resource so that their results can be more easily interpreted by other scientists.

The objective of this project has always been to provide high quality annotation for the rice genome. We generated, refined and updated gene models for the estimated 40,000-60,000 total rice genes, provided standardized annotation for each model, linked each model to functional annotation including expression data, gene ontologies, and tagged lines.

We have provided a resource to extend the annotation of the rice genome to other plant species by providing comparative alignments to other plant species. We have provided training in bioinformatics to over 100 plant scientists, sharing our informatic expertise with a broader range of scientists. We have developed agricultural genomics lecture and teaching modules for educating high school students and teachers on the significance of agricultural genomics.

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research Program # DBI-0321538 and DBI-0834043.