Genomic resources for functional analyses of the rice genome

With the availability of the rice genome sequence, rice research communities are entering a new era of plant functional genomics. The last decade has seen rapid worldwide progress on establishing platforms for rice functional genomic research. These platforms offer practical toolkits and genomic resources for high-throughput identification of genes and pathways. In this review, we summarize available genomic resources for functional analyses of the rice genome. These genomic resources include high-quality bacterial artificial chromosome libraries, large-scale expression sequence tags, full-length cDNA collections, large amounts of data on global expression profiles, various mutant libraries and integrated bioinformatics databases. We not only present the current status of genomic resources but also discuss their usage in elucidating gene functions of the rice genome.