Carnegie Institution for Science Releases Genome-Wide Metabolic Complements of Several Cereals

The Plant Biology Department of Carnegie Institution for Science is releasing genome-wide metabolic complements of a number of cereals including rice, barley, sorghum, and millet through the Plant Metabolic Network project website. Carnegie has previously released the metabolic complement of corn, and is releasing the sets of information to help researchers improve crop yields, combat world hunger, and produce biofuel that could lower fuel costs and fight climate change.

Program leader Seung Yon Rhee said, "We are trying to understand how the metabolic systems of plants are organized, function and evolve so that we and others can ultimately engineer a variety of different plants". The team consists of plant biologists, scientific curators, and intern students all working to to generate information from different fields of genomics, computer science, statistics, evolution, molecular biology, and biochemistry.

The Plant Metabolic Network website can be accessed at http://www.plantcyc.org/. For more details, the news release is available at http://carnegiescience.edu/news/have_you_had_your_cereal_today.