ABSTRACT

Increased Internet access and connection speed, along with decreasing costs of sequencing and transcriptomics technologies have greatly changed the maize research landscape since 1991, when the fi rst genetics-related data were imported into MaizeDB from content in the Maize Genetics Cooperation Newsletter (MNL, Kass et al. 2005). Initial datasets included gene and genetic stock lists, maize literature, genetic maps and current addresses of the research community. Now maize researchers have access to ever increasing data rich resources that include:

(1) species-neutral resources such as GenBank (NCBI, https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih/genbank, Benson 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013; NCBI 2013) for nucleotide sequences, including genome assemblies and SNP data; UniProt for protein sequence and functional annotations (https:// www.uniprot.org, Dimmer et al 2012; Uniprot Consortium 2012, 2013); and GRIN (USDA Germplasm Resources Information Network for information about public breeding germplasm https://www.ars-grin. gov);

(2) comparative plant-genome resources, notably Gramene (https:// gramene.org; Ware et al. 2002a,b; Jaiswal 2011; Youens-Clark et al. 2011) and its close partner Ensembl Plants (https://plants.ensembl. org; Kersey et al. 2012; Kinsella et al. 2011); Phytozome (https://www. phytozome.net; Goodstein et al. 2012); and CoGe (Lyons and Freeling 2008; Lyons et al. 2008), currently hosted by the iPlant Collaborative (www.iplantcollaborative.org; Goff et al. 2011);

(3) maize-specifi c databases, MaizeGDB (https://www.maizegdb.org; Lawrence et al. 2004, 2008; Schaeffer et al. 2011) and Panzea (https:// www.panzea.org; Gore et al. 2009), a diversity resource for Zea species;

(4) electronic-data fi les provided online as Supplementary Materials to peer-reviewed literature.