Plant Genomes Central

A new Plant Genomes Central service provides access to large-scale plant genomic and EST sequencing projects, with links to corresponding taxonomic information. Mapping data for a grow-ing number of plant genomes is also available in the Map Viewer. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PMGifs/Genomes/PlantList.html.


HomoloGene Expanded to Include Plants

HomoloGene is a homology resource that includes both curated and calculated orthologs and homologs for nucleotide sequences represented in UniGene and LocusLink. It features pairwise comparisons between 12 plant and animal organisms, including human, mouse, rat, cow, zebrafish, clawed frog, fly, thale cress, barley, wheat, maize, and rice.

The calculated orthologs and homologs are the result of nucleotide sequence comparisons between all UniGene clusters and the Drosophila genome for each pair of organisms. These orthologs and homologs are considered putative since they are based only on sequence comparisons, and results may change as more full-length mRNA sequences become available. The calculated datasets are available by FTP at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/HomoloGene/.

Curated orthologs include ortholog gene pairs reported in the literature, in the Mouse Genome Database at the Jackson Laboratory, and in the Zebrafish Information Network at the University of Oregon.

The HomoloGene service is available at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/HomoloGene/.


Plants and Frog Added to UniGene

The UniGene database of gene-oriented EST clusters now includes its first five plant organisms—thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), rice (Oryza sativa), wheat (Triticum aestivum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), and maize (Zea mays). The frog (Xenopus laevis) was also added recently, bringing the total number of UniGene databases to 11.