Bamboos are a group of woody perennial evergreen (except for certain temperate species) plants in the true grass family Poaceae, subfamily Bambusoideae, tribe Bambuseae. Moso bamboo, Phyllostachys heterocycla cv.Pubescens, is a large woody bamboo with the highest ecological, economic, and cultural values of all bamboos in Asia and accounting for around 70% of total area of bamboo growth and 5 billion US dollars of annual forest production in China.

With the number of genome sequences growing much more rapidly than any other plant families, the grass family (Poaceae) becomes an ideal system for comparative study of gene and genome structure and function. However, the only exception is the subfamily of bamboos, Bambusoideae, which contains more than 1,000 species but has little data available in DNA or protein sequence databases.

Consequently, we developed the first large sequence dataset for studying the structure and function of bamboo genes to fills the gap in the grass family for comparative genomics. Till September of 2009, this Moso bamboo cDNA database (MBCD) was composed of 10,608 full length cDNA sequences and nearly 38,000 ESTs from different tissues of Moso bamboo. The database includes the information on bamboo genomic analysis in the National Center for Gene Research & Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with Chinese Academy of Forestry and the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan in China. We hope these resources greatly encourage the progress of bamboo research.

The database has the following features: 1) FL-cDNA clone list search. Given cDNA clone ID or NCBI accession number, the MBCD will display the cDNA sequences with predicted ORF information, library (tissue) sources, clone ID, Genbank accession numbers, and corresponding ESTs; 2) Sequence search. Blast is provided for sequence alignment search against the cDNA database. Conserved domain search is also available when putative function information (pfam) is entered; 3) FTP download links. The cDNA sequences, annotations, and corresponding ESTs can be downloaded as compressed files of gzip or bzip; and 4) Other useful web links. Other database websites and research institutes related to bamboo research are conveniently accessible through this website.

We welcome you here to this site to contribute information that may be readily incorporated into bamboo genome database. If you have comments, feel changes should be made, or if you have new information that would be valuable to the database, we encourage you to contact us at your convenience. Any suggestions or comments about the bamboo database would be really appreciated.