Location: Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research
Project Number: 5030-21000-068-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Apr 10, 2018
End Date: Apr 9, 2023
Objective:
Objective 1: Accelerate maize trait analysis, germplasm analysis, genetic studies, and breeding through stewardship of maize genomes, genetic data, genotype data, and phenotype data.
Objective 2: Develop an infrastructure to curate, integrate, query, and visualize the genetic, genomic, and phenotypic relationships in maize germplasm.
Objective 3: Identify and curate key datasets for benchmarking genomic discovery tools for the functional annotation of maize genomes, for agronomic trait analyses, for breeding (including genome editing), and for improving database interoperability.
Objective 4: Provide community support services, training and documentation, meeting coordination, support for community elections and surveys, and support for the crop genome database community.
Objective 5: Collaborate with database developers and plant researchers to develop improved methods and mechanisms for open, standardized data and knowledge exchange to enhance database utility and interoperability.
Approach:
The Maize Genetics and Genomics Database (MaizeGDB – http://www.maizegdb.org) is the model organism database for maize. MaizeGDB’s overall aim is to provide long-term storage, support, and stability to the maize research community’s data and to provide informatics services for access, integration, visualization, and knowledge discovery. The MaizeGDB website, database, and underlying resources allow plant researchers to understand basic plant biology, make genetic enhancement, facilitate breeding efforts, and translate those findings into products that increase crop quality and production. To accelerate research and breeding progress, generated data must be made freely and easily accessible. Curation of high-quality and high-impact datasets has been the foundation of the MaizeGDB project since its inception over 25 years ago. MaizeGDB serves as a two-way conduit for getting maize research data to and from our stakeholders. The maize research community uses data at MaizeGDB to facilitate their research, and in return, their published data gets curated at MaizeGDB. The information and data provided at MaizeGDB and facilitated through outreach has directly been used in research that has had broad commercial, social, and academic impacts. The MaizeGDB team will make accessible high-quality, actively curated and reliable genetic, genomic, and phenotypic description datasets. At the root of high-quality genome annotation lies well-supported assemblies and annotations. For this reason, we focus our efforts on benefitting researchers by developing a system to ensure long-term stewardship of both a representative reference genome sequence assembly with associated structural and functional annotations as well as additional reference-quality genomes that help represent the diversity of maize. In addition, we will enable researchers to access data in a customized and flexible manner by deploying tools that enable direct interaction with the MaizeGDB database. Continued efforts to engage in education, outreach, and organizational needs of the maize research community will involve the creation and deployment of video and one-on-one tutorials, updating maize Cooperators on developments of interest to the community, and supporting the information technology needs of the Maize Genetics Executive Committee and Annual Maize Genetics Conference Steering Committee.
