Databases and Systems

13 MAIZEDB: THE MAIZE GENOME
DATABASE
INTRODUCTION
Mary Polacco and Ed Coe
USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Research Unit
Department of Agronomy 210 Curtis Hall
University of Missouri -- Columbia
Columbia, MO 65211
In 1923, R. A. Emerson addressed a detailed letter to “Students of Corn Genetics’,
soliciting community solutions to issues of gene nomenclature. (Emerson 1923)
Building on this stimulus, Emerson hosted a ‘cornfab’ in his hotel room, during the
December 1928 Genetics meetings in NY. April 1929, Emerson and colleagues
disseminated the first Maize Newsletter (MNL): a mimeographed summary of the
‘cornfab’, along with a list of 20 available stocks, a list of curators for individual
linkage groups, a summary of available linkage information, and 78 references where
linkage data were to be found. The first published linkage map compilation in 1935
showed 62 loci. (Emerson et al 1935) In 1991, USDA-ARS initiated a plant genome
database project, and tasked the editor of the MNL, Ed Coe, to develop a maize
genome database. The 1991 MNL, now volume 65, included 1439 Stocks available
from a USDA-ARS funded Stock Center, 840 entries on the Gene List with 423 key
references, an additional 776 references from the annual literature and some 950
colleague addresses. Data from this issue were transferred into the Fall 1991
prototype MaizeDB.
The 1991 prototype was based on insight gained by the Coli Genetics Stock Center,
New Haven, CT with an industry standard software, Sybase, for the database
management system, and the development of Genera software (Letovsky & Berlyn
1994) to create forms for query and data entry and define entities without writing
code. This choice of software has permitted concentrating resources on data curation
by a team of ‘biologists’, with support of a systems analyst. The Sybase software had
been employed by various other species genome databases, including the human
genome. A sample of the Genera form specification for the short locus query form is