Rice researchers and farmers can now access two new information resources following announcements made at the International Rice Congress in Beijing last week.

The first resource, officially launched by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at the meeting, is the Rice Knowledge Bank, a freely available database of information on topics such as pest management and the transplantation of hybrid rice.

The second resource is a supply of microarrays — which helps scientists to locate genes for particular traits — containing 54,000 predicted rice genes. The Beijing Genomics Institute, which has sequenced a subspecies of rice, said it would supply the microarrays to IRRI and Yale University in the United States.

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Reference: Nature: 419, 330 (2002)