Washington

Take your pick: US efforts may focus on the indaco strain that is prevalent outside Japan. Credit: CORBIS/FULVIO ROITER

The US government has awarded $12.3 million to The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, and a consortium of universities to finance the country's component of an international effort to sequence the rice genome.

TIGR will receive $7.2 million over three years, with another $5.1 million going to Clemson University in South Carolina, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

Between them, the institutions plan to sequence 50 million of the 430 million DNA base pairs estimated to make up the rice genome. They will begin with the 24 million bases in chromosome 10, which has been allocated to the United States.

Although the rice genome was initially due to be completed by 2008, Japan, which is leading the project, has announced that it is planning to provide additional funding to complete its own sequencing efforts by 2004 (see Nature 401, 102; 1999).

Ed Kaleikau, director of plant research at the competitive grants office of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), said that the US push would follow from the existing effort to sequence the genome of the model plant Arabidopsis, due to be completed by the end of next year.

”We're using a standard approach that builds on the strengths of the human and Arabidopsis [genome sequencing] projects,” he says. USDA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will each contribute $6 million to the project, with another $300,000 coming from the Department of Energy.

The international project will use a conventional approach to find the sequence of japonica rice, which is a commercially important strain.

Celera, the Rockville-based gene-sequencing company run by Craig Venter, has boasted that it could sequence the rice genome more rapidly than the publicly funded project, using its ‘shotgun’ approach (see Nature 398, 545; 1999). But a spokesman for Celera says that it is likely to concentrate on the genome of indaco rice, another important strain.

Indaco is the prevalent strain grown outside Japan and, according to Kaleikau, China has said that it will study it, rather than japonica rice, when it sequences chromosome 4 of the rice genome for the project.

Earlier this month, the NSF announced $60 million of research grants under the second year of its plant genome project. These show that the agency plans to support genomics research in a wide range of commercially important plants, including multi-million dollar awards for research on potatoes and loblolly pine trees, as well as wheat, maize and Arabidopsis.

The NSF also said it would support a $5.3 million Arabidopsis information resource, to be hosted jointly by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology at Stanford University, California, and the National Center of Genome Resources at Santa Fe, New Mexico, which will disseminate data on the plant's genome.