Maize is not only economically the most important crop in the US but also a classical genetic model for plant genetic studies. Public efforts to sequence the maize genome has made good progress in the last few years and considerable genomic and EST sequence information has been publicaly available. Complete decoding of the maize genome funded by the NSF-PGR Program in the next three years will greatly influence our understanding of the molecular basis of important agronomic traits, plant development, gene regulation and genome evolution. In parallel to genome sequencing, characterization of the maize transcriptome is another important but challenging task in functional analysis of the genome.

We aim at profiling the maize genome using SAGE technology. With funding from OARDC, we have made one RL-SAGE library of the leaf tissue of the inbred line B73. Additional three 5’ and 3’ RL-SAGE libraries using leaf tissues infected with northern corn bacterial blight pathogen are being made. The RL-SAGE tag sequences and analysis results are shown in the database.