Plant Ontology (PO) Consortium is happy to announce the release #0408 of the PO database! http://www.plantontology.org.

For detailed release notes, please visit http://www.plantontology.org/docs/release_notes/index.html

* Ontology - 1128 PO terms [19 NEW] - 58117 annotations [18572 NEW]

* Ontology and annotation browser (http://www.plantontology.org/amigo/ go.cgi) - NEW: Added ~16000 annotations on genes and mutant phenotype germplasm from tomato, tobacco, potato, eggplant, pepper and Hyoscyamus. These annotations are contributed by Solanaceae Genomics Network (SGN; http://sgn.cornell.edu/) - Updated and added new annotations contributed by TAIR (for Arabidopsis) and Gramene (for rice) databases.

* Publication - The Plant Ontology Database: a community resource for plant structure and developmental stages controlled vocabulary and annotations. Avraham et al. Nucleic Acids Research 2008 36:D449-D454; http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/36/suppl_1/D449

* Ontology requests - We encourage researchers to submit ontology requests at: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id=76834&atid=835555

* Collaborators - We welcome our new collaborators: Dennis Stevenson: NY Botanical Graden Maria A. Gandolfo: Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University Bioversity International: http://www.bioversityinternational.org Generation Challenge Programme (GCP): http://www.generationcp.org

The Plant Ontology Consortium web: http:www.plantontology.org e-mail: po-dev at plantontology.org

The project is funded by National Science Foundation, USA, (Grant No. DBI-0703908)