Scientific background
The comparative analysis of plant genomes has become a key area of research within the last few years. This is due to the important discovery that plant genomes are composed of similar genomic 'building blocks'. While their intergenic DNA contents may vary, the gene order of closely related genomes are remarkably similar.

The last few years have also seen an explosion in the amount of sequence information (both nucleotide and protein) available in the public databases (e.g. EMBL). This growth in 'genomics' is having a profound effect on the way that scientists can do science and the next few years will almost certainly see similarly huge increases in the information produced from transcriptomics and proteomics facilities. There is, therefore, a clear need for easy to use tools to manage this wealth of information.

Making sense of the data
UK CropNet was established in 1996 to apply a bioinformatics approach to the study of genome evolution in crop plants with specific aims of developing software and databases that will facilitate the querying of genomic information from different crop species. Particular emphasis has been placed on developing software tools for comparative mapping.

To manage and make sense of the available information, we have used the ACEDB database system to create separate databases for each of the UK CropNet projects (see projects for more information and contact details for each project).

Individual databases for Arabidopsis, Barley, Brassica, Forage grasses, Millet and comparative analysis have been developed by each of the partners and are under constant development, reflecting the ever increasing amount of genomic information made available by the scientific community. Furthermore, new databases are currently under development and will also be made available via this site. In addition new tools and displays to highlight the agronomic significance of comparative analysis are being developed.

Where to find us
The six projects that comprise UK CropNet are located at four different institutions around the UK. These are based at:

Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) in Aberystwyth

John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich

Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (NASC) at the University of Nottingham

Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) in Dundee

Since 1999, we have been running an ongoing series of training events at each of the four member institutions, where we provide hands-on tuition in our databases and software. We would also be more than happy to try to arrange training sessions and/or present talks at your institution. Contact us for more details.

Accessing data
All UK CropNet databases are freely available for anyone to download from our FTP site (though you will also need to download the necessary ACEDB software). Although the ACEDB software was principally designed for UNIX systems, Macintosh, Linux, and Windows versions are also available.

However, because not all potential users have either the time, or computer facilities to set up their own (local) database system, we provide an alternate, web based, access to the databases. Two main options are currently available for this (see databases for more details) though both have limited capabilities when compared to the stand-alone database software. To circumvent this problem, UK CropNet is currently working on ways of increasing the functionality of web-based access (see CITA page at John Innes Centre for more details). The near future should see the availablity of web-based tools that can query multiple ACEDB-style databases (and possibly even non-ACEDB-style databases) in a simple fashion, with no need for all databases to be held at the same site.