About POPcorn

The Project Portal for corn provides a single point of access for maize researchers by providing a searchable database of maize projects and resources, and by enabling researchers to retrieve data from multiple sources with one sequence query. To learn more about POPcorn and cite its use, we encourage you to visit: Cannon EK, Birkett SM, Braun BL, Kodavali S, Jennewein DM, Yilmaz A, Antonescu V, Antonescu C, Harper LC, Gardiner JM, Schaeffer ML, Campbell DA, Andorf CM, Andorf D, Lisch D, Koch KE, McCarty DR, Quackenbush J, Grotewold E, Lushbough CM, Sen TZ, Lawrence CJ. POPcorn: An Online Resource Providing Access to Distributed and Diverse Maize Project Data. Int J Plant Genomics. 2011;2011:923035. Epub 2011 Dec 27. PubMed PMID: 22253616; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3255282.

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POPcorn will be integrated into MaizeGDB.org by October, 2011.

Work on POPcorn began in February of 2009. It will be released in three phases over two years.

	Phase 1		Provide a searchable database of maize projects and resources. Completed in April 2009. Data is updated monthly and information about new projects can be submitted.
	Phase 2		Provide tools for sequence-based searching of participating maize projects and resources. – Released in April, 2010. Improvements and additional functionality updated multiple times a year. – The POPcorn BLAST utility became the main MaizeGDB.org BLAST utility in fall 2011. – CViT (Chromosome Viewing Tool) has been re-developed for use in MaizeGDB.org and POPcorn for visualizing data.
	Phase 3		Provide tools and processes to enable projects to transition their data to MaizeGDB when the projects are complete. ZeAlign is available for aligning sequence on the MaizeGDB genome browser

	Status		–As of spring 2012, POPcorn functionality has been linked to MaizeGDB.org. It is being integrated more fully into the redesigned MaizeGDB.org website with the initial release at the 2012 Maize Genetics Conference. – We are continuing to fix any bugs that appear. – Although the POPcorn project has official ended, we will continue to add datasets as community interest and availablity of personnel permits.

POPcorn is funded by NSF, award #0743804 with in-kind contributions from USDA-ARS.

The full project description is available here.

The poster from the March, 2010 Maize Meeting is here
The poster from the PAG XIX (January, 2011) is here.
The PowerPoint presentation from the PAG XIX (January, 2011) meeting is here.

A list of POPcorn personnel and contact information is available here .