Dear biomaRt users, I would like to notify you that the Gramene database has recently been added to the BioMart central service which makes this database available to us through biomaRt. Gramene www.gramene.org), is a resource for comparative grass genomics and includes Maize, Rice and also Arabidopsis. Here is a short example using Gramene: > library(biomaRt) > listMarts() name version 1 ensembl ENSEMBL 42 GENE (SANGER) 2 compara_mart_homology_42 ENSEMBL 42 HOMOLOGY (SANGER) 3 compara_mart_pairwise_ga_42 ENSEMBL 42 PAIRWISE ALIGNMENTS (SANGER) 4 snp ENSEMBL 42 VARIATION (SANGER) 5 vega VEGA 21 (SANGER) 6 uniprot UNIPROT PROTOTYPE (EBI) 7 msd MSD PROTOTYPE (EBI) 8 wormbase_current WORMBASE 167 (CSHL) 9 ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL GRAMENE (CSHL) 10 dicty DICTYBASE (NORTHWESTERN) > gramene = useMart('ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL') > listDatasets(gramene) dataset description version 1 osativa_snp Rice Polymorphisms (SNPs) 2 athaliana_gene_ensembl Arabidopsis Gene Models (TAIR6) TAIR6 3 osativa_gene_ensembl Rice Gene Models (TIGRv4) TIGR 4 zmays_gene_ensembl Maize Gene Models (Gramene FGENESH) BAC01 gramene = useMart('ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL', dataset='athaliana_gene_ensembl') > ath1 = c("261578_at","257476_at","257524_at","259129_at") > result = getBM(attributes=c("affy_ath1_id","tair_id","chromosome_name","start_p osition","description"), filters="affy_ath1", values=ath1, mart=gramene) > result[9,] affy_ath1_id tair_id chromosome_name start_position 9 259129_at AT3G02150.1-TAIR 3 391098 description 9 PTF1 (PLASTID TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR 1); transcription factor; a chloroplast trans-acting factor of the psbD light-responsive promoter. Regards, Steffen