Major databases to study genes expression in plants (A case study: Rice)

Rice, as one of the most important crops, has the smallest genome among cereals and is considered as a model plant for genetic studies. The small size of this plant’s genome has led to comprehensive studies on it, resulting in a large amounts of data to be obtained. Properly collecting and storing these data and managing data from various experiments in a database for accessing researchers to them to avoid re-work and to compare their results with the results of other researchers is very important. To achieve these, bioinformatics can be great help. Therefore, the creation and development of specialized databases and the use of bioinformatics tools for data processing, efficient organization, analysis and visualization are necessary. In this paper, the major databases for studying gene expression at three levels, RNA, protein and metabolome in rice are reviewed and the characteristics of these databases for each level are discussed.