Gramene.

Access to plant genome sequence in the past has been limited to a few references genomes.  But with the recent advances in engineering it is now possible to produce large amounts of sequence and image based data sets at ever decreasing cost. These scales of data have created opportunities as well as challenges associated with data management, integration, analysis, and access.  One such effort to integrate these data sets is the Gramene project.  The Gramene project (www.gramene.org)  is a resource for comparative plant genomes, which contains information on reference genome sequences, genetic variations, and biochemical pathways.  In this talk I will present recent work that makes use of the Gramene infrastructure to characterize the gene content in the maize the B73 genome, and the use of the use of ultra high throughput sequencing approaches to characterize genome diversity in maize.