<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>Gramene (http://www.gramene.org/) is a comparative genome database for cereal crops
and a community resource for rice. We are populating and curating Gramene with
annotated rice (<italic>Oryza sativa</italic>) genomic sequence data and associated biological information
including molecular markers, mutants, phenotypes, polymorphisms and Quantitative Trait
Loci (QTL). In order to support queries across various data sets as well as across external
databases, Gramene will employ three related controlled vocabularies. The specific goal of
Gramene is, first to provide a Trait Ontology (TO) that can be used across the cereal
crops to facilitate phenotypic comparisons both within and between the genera. Second, a
vocabulary for plant anatomy terms, the Plant Ontology (PO) will facilitate the curation
of morphological and anatomical feature information with respect to expression,
localization of genes and gene products and the affected plant parts in a phenotype. The
TO and PO are both in the early stages of development in collaboration with the
International Rice Research Institute, TAIR and MaizeDB as part of the Plant Ontology
Consortium. Finally, as part of another consortium comprising macromolecular databases
from other model organisms, the Gene Ontology Consortium, we are annotating the
confirmed and predicted protein entries from rice using both electronic and manual
curation.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2002 Apr; 3(2):132-136