The Project Portal for corn provides a single point of access for maize researchers by providing a searchable database of maize projects and resources, and by enabling researchers to retrieve data from multiple sources with one sequence query.

Work on POPcorn began in February of 2009. It will be released in three phases over two years.

	Phase 1		Provide a searchable database of maize projects and resources.
	Phase 2		Provide tools for sequence-based searching of participating maize projects and resources.
	Phase 3		Provide behind-the-scenes tools to enable projects to transition their data to MaizeGDB when the projects are complete.
	Upon completion, POPcorn will become a part of MaizeGDB.
	Status		– The initial set of searchable projects was released in April '09 – We are continuing to add projects to the searchable database. – Development of POPcorn BLAST and a tool for searching sequence-indexed data is under way; we plan to release an alpha version for public comment in February, 2010.

POPcorn is funded by NSF, award #0743804 with in-kind contributions from USDA-ARS.

The full project description is available here.
The poster from the PAG XVIII (January, 2010) is here.
The PowerPoint presentation for the January, 2010 MaizeGDB working group meeting is here.

A list of POPcorn personnel and contact information is available here.