A HIGH-QUALITY version of the rice genome is now freely available on the Internet.
Rice was the second plant to be sequenced after the lab workhorse, the fast-growing cress Arabidopsis thaliana. But the first versions were created by private companies and were only available to researchers prepared to sign restrictive licence agreements. The journal Science came under fire last year for publishing a paper on the rice genome assembled by Syngenta of Switzerland even though the company would not make the actual sequence freely available.
Now the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project, a 10-nation publicly funded effort, has unveiled the…
