Hi Folks,

I just wanted to let you know that GDR has not been selected for a renewal award this year from the Plant Genome Program. I am waiting on the actual reviews but after speaking with our designated program manager it seems that they just do not feel that our community are at the stage where we can propose including either genome sequence and metabolic pathway data and apparently QTL data is not that important either. They did stress they understood the importance of the database to our community and may be willing to provide a supplement to the original grant (up to $100 K) and then we can apply again next year. If we get the supplement (still unsure if we are even eligible to apply as we were not last year) it won't be enough to allow us to do very much as half of that amount goes for University F&A. Last year we were able to use funds from WSU and Clemson to help keep it going but that won't be the case this year, so we will have to let some key folk go. NSF were under the impression that we were receiving money from the USDA NRI program to house the Rosaceae data, which of course is not the case. This also thought it had orginally been funded through USDA which of course was also not the case.

I'd like to consult further with the community to find out their opinion on what direction they'd like to see GDR move toward and I'll work closely with the NSF to see if they are going to be willing to fund it in the future or if it is simply a lost cause going to that program for a database project. If not there where should we go or should we just let it go altogether?

I apologise that we did not get funded, I really felt we put in a sound proposal this year, gearing ourselves up to get the genome sequence, array and metabolic data incorporated as soon as it became available instead of having to play catch-up like many other family wide plant databases.

As always, thanks for your support. I'm looking forward to catching up with all of you at the Rosaceae workshop in June and hopefully we can have some further discussions then about this issue.

Cheers

Dorrie

--------------------------------------------------------------------- Dorrie Main, PhD Associate Professor of Bioinformatics Center for Integrated Biotechnology Dept of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture Washington State University 45 Johnson Hall, Pullman, WA 99164-6414 Email: dorrie@wsu.edu Tel: (509) 335 2774 Fax: (509) 335 8690 ---------------------------------------------------------------------