Maize genomics

Recent US and European funding initiatives have highlighted the importance of maize to world agriculture. To date, maize researchers have generated an excellent genetic map, consisting of both restriction fragment length polymorphism and microsatellite markers, yeast and bacterial artificial chromosome large insert libraries, large numbers of expressed sequence tags and several functional genomics resources. Unlike most crop-based resources, these are available to the whole maize community and taken together form the cornerstone of maize genomics. In this mini-review, we have attempted to provide an up to date assessment of both the current resources available and the possible future direction of maize genomics research.