The Rice Genome Annotation Project
Rice
is a model species for monocotyledonous plants and the
cereals (maize, wheat, barley, sorghum). Rice provides more than one
fifth of all calories consumed by humans. The finished quality sequence
of the rice genome was first
published in 2005. The Buell lab was
funded by the National Science Foundation (DBI-0321538, DBI-0834043) to
annotate the
rice genome. This project began in January 2004. The goal of the
project is to provide high quality, structural and functional
annotation of the rice genome to the research community.
The objectives of this project include generating a reference
sequence
for the rice genome, identifying genes in the rice genome, functionally
annotating those gene models, providing Gene Ontology classifications
of genes, identifying genetic markers within the rice genome, relating
expression data to the rice genes and genome, identifying paralogous
gene families, and providing the public with full access to these data.
We have produced gene models for the estimated 56,000 rice genes and
have provided standardized annotation for each model. Because genome
annotation is a dynamic effort, we have invited community annotators
to
join in the annotation of the rice genome, and this has greatly
increased the quality of the annotation of rice genes.
Additional information about this project, as well as links to
downloadable data, is available on the Rice Genome Annotation Project website: (http://rice.plantbiology.msu.edu).
The
most commonly used interface to the rice genome annotation database is
the rice
genome browser. A publication describing this
resource is freely
available.
