International Rice Informatics Consortium: 3,000 Rice Genomes Explorations and Beyond

The International Rice Informatics Consortium (IRIC) initiated several important and scientifically sound collaborations to better understand the biological meaning of discovered variations in rice genomes, link these variations with important traits, build predictive models, and understand rice evolution and domestication. Not limited to the 3,000 rice genome project, we have integrated data from the High Density Rice Array – HDRA (McCouch et. al, 2016, Nature Communications 7:10532, doi:10.1038/ncomms10532) to our SNP-Seek database (http://snp-seek.irri.org). To facilitate collaborative development of SNP-Seek, we made it Breeding API (BrAPI, http://docs.brapi.apiary.io/) compliant, opened the source code and provided comprehensive documentation. SNP-Seek was designed to be a prototype for the IRIC portal, but the IRIC portal should be much broader and provide access to data from many other web resources. Our new initiative on developing an integrated search engine will index data from all public rice-related databases. Other major new projects include creating a resource for comparative analysis of rice genomes, a database of GWAS results and visualization tools, detecting large structural variations and some others.