International Rice Information Consortium- Update- IRIC Portal

New technologies produce terabytes of valuable information about rice: genome sequences of thousands varieties and cultivars, gene expression in different tissues, developmental stages and environments and automated phenotyping measurements. In addition, the rice knowledgebase is enriched by studies in other species using orthologous relationships between genes. Integration of such diverse pieces of data will enable many discoveries of gene-trait associations and will lead to new hypotheses on the mechanism of gene function. Organizing this information into proper data structures, providing visualization and basic analysis tools are challenging tasks due to the volume and complexity of the data. The International Rice Informatics Consortium (IRIC) aims to facilitate access to information for the broad rice scientific community by developing an IRIC information portal. The initial phase of development will be discussed.