CropSeqDB - a new CropNet database
We are pleased to launch a new database (CropSeqDB) as part of the UK CropNet project. This database has been created for two main reasons:

• To act as a repository of sequence information for UK crop species
• To link sequences from these species to homologous sequences in Arabidopsis

In order to focus on just UK crops, CropSeqDB only contains information for species detailed in the DEFRA National Listing of UK crop species (which includes cereals, vegetables, oil & fibre plants, and fodder crops).

Sequences for these species have been taken from the EMBL database and linked to the Arabidopsis Genome Resource (AGR) by exhaustive BLAST analysis.

Contents of CropSeqDB
CropSeqDB contains information for 178 different species including common names and other taxonomic information. All available sequences from the EMBL database (including EST and GSS sequences) are included in CropSeqDB. Sequence information is also classified by gene name, gene product and keyword.

CropSeqDB contains ~450,000 EMBL sequences which have been BLAST searched against all Arabidopsis protein sequences in SWISSPROT and TREMBL. About 70% of these sequences have homologies to proteins in AGR. The main species represented in CropSeqDB are:

Species	Common name	Number of sequences
Glycine max	Soya	134,758
Lycopersicon esculentum	Tomato	97,121
Zea mays	Corn	77,602
Triticum aestivum	Wheat	47,966
Hordeum vulgare	Barley	41,684
Solanum tuberosum	Potato	20,529
Secale cereale	Rye	7,781
Brassica napus	Oilseed rape, canola	2,346
Brassica rapa	Turnip	2,130
Pisum sativum	Pea	1,075

Other information
Please note that CropSeqDB is not intended to be used as a comprehensive resource about all of the species that it represents. If you are seeking detailed information about a species such as Barley, then you should try a database like BarleyDB or GrainGenes, or one of the other databases available through UK CropNet.

What CropSeqDB is intended to be used as is a way of quickly finding DNA sequences from UK crop species, for seeing a brief description of that sequence (with links to the original EMBL database entry), and for finding the most likely homologue of that sequence in Arabidopsis. It is envisaged that the latter point will be very useful as an increasing number of Arabidopsis knock-out lines are becoming available (and which can be ordered via NASC).

All sequences in CropSeqDB are available to search on our UK CropNet BLAST server.

If you have any questions about CropSeqDB, then please email us. We welcome all comments and criticisms.

This is version 1.00 of CropSeqDB. Any resemblance between any sequence in CropSeqDB and any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. CropSeqDB was designed, developed, and implemented by Keith Bradnam.