New Plant Breeding Tool to Help Make Perennial Crops

Scientists, including a team from the University of Florida, have unveiled a new tool that will help plant researchers annotate genes quickly and accurately. Cristopher Henry, a computational biologist at the University of Chicago who led in creating the database called PlantSEED, said it is an important step toward designing improved crops, such as rice that grows more efficiently, or is more drought resistant, or creating perennial corn.

The open-access system PlantSEED integrates data from plant scientists around the world into a common platform, to achieve better results and quickly-updated plant models for everyone using them. The creators of the database said PlantSEED will help plant scientists make better use of genome information by helping them create consistently accurate models for all plant genomes contained in the database.

Read more about this research at http://news.ufl.edu/2014/06/10/new-plant-gene-labeling/.