The TIGR rice genome annotation resource: annotating the rice genome and creating resources for plant biologists

Rice is not only a major food staple for the world's population but it also is a model species for a major group of flowering plants, the monocotyledonous plants. Draft genomic sequence of two subspecies of rice, Oryza sativa spp. japonica and indica ssp. are publicly available. To provide the community with a resource to data-mine the rice genome, we have constructed an annotation resource for rice (http://www.tigr.org/tdb/e2k1/osa1/). In this resource, we have annotated the rice genome for gene content, identified motifs/domains within the predicted genes, constructed a rice repeat database, identified related sequences in other plant species, and identified syntenic sequences between rice and maize. All of the data is available through web-based interfaces, FTP downloads, and a Distributed Annotation System.