The purpose of the online resource presented here, POPcorn (Project Portal for corn), is to enhance accessibility of maize genetic and genomic resources for plant biologists. Currently, many online locations are difficult to find, some are best searched independently, and individual project websites often degrade over time—sometimes disappearing entirely. The POPcorn site makes available (1) a centralized, web-accessible resource to search and browse descriptions of ongoing maize genomics projects, (2) a single, stand-alone tool that uses web Services and minimal data warehousing to search for sequence matches in online resources of diverse offsite projects, and (3) a set of tools that enables researchers to migrate their data to the long-term model organism database for maize genetic and genomic information: MaizeGDB. Examples demonstrating POPcorn’s utility are provided herein. 1. Introduction 1.1. Need for the POPcorn Resource In 1998, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP), as part of the National Plant Genome Initiative. The establishment of PGRP coincided with an explosion of technologies that allowed large-scale genomic experiments to flourish, and PGRP grants fueled unprecedented advances in plant genomics research. This program was unique in that it strongly encouraged large collaborative projects and required project outcomes to be publicly available. Largely as the result of NSF’s forward thinking program, many independent online resources for plant research have been developed in the past 12 years. While this abundance of genomic data has transformed plant science in many ways, it has also created some problems: the plethora of independent websites requires researcher awareness of the various projects and what data each offers. Finding and using these resources is not always straightforward. Most sites use a variety of different tools that are often unique to that resource, each requiring that the researcher learn how to interact with them. In addition, it is also often difficult to use the results from one resource in another, and it is not generally possible to search multiple resources at the same time. Instead, researchers find themselves repeating the same search (e.g., BLAST [1]) at multiple sites in the hopes of locating all information relevant to their research. In addition, when funding for a project ends, the data generated often are not moved to long-term repositories. Thus, project sites degrade over time and sometimes disappear entirely. When the previously accessible data
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