Rice proteomics and beyond

Abstract

Rice is the most widely consumed staple food for both developed as well as developing world, more so for Asia. According to the data of FAOSTAT (2012), rice has the third-highest worldwide production after sugarcane and maize, among all agricultural crops. Developing countries account for 95% of the total rice production, with China and India contributing for nearly half of the world output. The main focus of rice research has been on crop improvement to increase productivity and adaptation to adverse climatic conditions. While rice genome sequence has been available for years now, high quality and uniform annotation is a necessity for genome sequence data to be fully utilized by researchers. Towards this, the completion of Rice Annotation Project (RAP) database (http:// rapdb.dna.affrc.go.jp/), based on the new chromosome pseudomolecule Os-Nipponbare-Reference-IRGSP-1.0 (a joint version of IRGSP and MSU pseudomolecules) is important. The existence of a common gene set and uniform annotation allows rice research community to work from a common resource so that their results can be more easily interpreted by other laboratories.