[From genome analysis to construction of an integrated omics knowledgebase for crops]

The advances in high-throughput technologies have enabled high-speed accumulation of omics data, which contain a large amount of genetic variations and their functional information. The integration and deep utilization of those data will be a long-term and difficult task, which requires highly efficient data storage and powerful data analysis and mining tools. In the past several years, our group has conducted multi-level genomic analyses in several plants, including genome assembly and annotation, comparative and population genomic studies, through collaboration with other labs inside and outside of our institution. Meanwhile, we have integrated a large amount of rice germplasm information and omics data into a structural database and developed related data query, visual display and mining web tools. Here, we summarize some of those results and discuss our next goal to construct an integrated omics knowledgebase for crops to support functional genomics and molecular design breeding.