A community resource for wheat functional genomics

UK-based resources for wheat research are currently isolated and tailored to 'in-house' needs. As such they are often invisible to or inaccessible by the outside world. With the backing of the wheat community, Monogram (consisting of Rothamsted, IGER, JIC and SCRI), the Wheat Genetic Improvement Network (WGIN) and the Small Grain Cereal Network (SGCN), we propose to initiate a process which brings together these resources under one umbrella namely the existing SGCN and its associated web site. Our approach will organise the UK's wheat tools and resources such that they become accessible to all, while having a 'customer first' approach whereby users of the new SGCN site need to perform single searches regardless of the resources' physical location. With the resources requested the Bristol group will oversee the process whereby both its current biological/bioinformatics' resources and several new resources become available via the SGCN web site. This process will form the initial resource 'modules' of the SGCN web site to which other members of the community will be encouraged to add to over time in line with BBSRC's recently launched data sharing policy. Given the global challenges facing all plant scientists we believe that this proposal represents the best opportunity yet for the UK wheat community to work as one and face the future as an integrated community.

As part of the BBSRC funded Investigating Gene Function (IGF) programme (IGF12403) the Bristol group, in collaboration with the John Innes Centre and SCRI was charged with developing a basic set of biological and bioinformatics tools for wheat genomics. Several important resources, from all the major centres carrying out wheat research, have been developed since the creation of the IGF resources and these now need to be properly integrated into the available analytical tools. These recently developed resources include a 244K feature wheat array, various TILLING populations, large data sets of cDNA EST microarray and Affymetrix GeneChip experiments and genotyping data generated by various procedures. This proposal is therefore designed to directly address the funding agencies concern that wheat resources are 'plagued by the inability of different providers to co-ordinate properly' and it therefore aims to link all UK wheat resources in a form which can be used by the non-(bioinformatic)-expert and which encourages resource usage among the wider cereal community.