On April 4, Monsanto (St. Louis, MO) announced it has completed a “working draft” genetic map of the rice genome and that it will share the information freely with academic researchers. Although most praise the decision—the first time a large multinational corporation has agreed to disclose so much information about an important crop to the academic world—some question the availability of the data and the eventual cost of using it.

The map, which was compiled under contract by the laboratory of Leroy Hood of the University of Washington (Seattle), covers locations on all 12 rice chromosomes of the Oryza sativa (japonica variety) rice genome, but is not a complete sequence of any of them. Monsanto's database is a shotgun library of 80,000 bacterial clones of the genome, which is estimated to contain between 40,000 and 50,000 genes: data includes a few hundred base pairs from each end of each clone and provide 5X coverage of the genome.

According to Gerard Barry, a Monsanto research genomics leader, Monsanto will release the data by mid-July to the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP), a public effort comprising researchers in Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Canada, France, UK and US. Monsanto's data will help researchers fill in the gaps between sections that have already been sequenced.

Roger Beachy, director of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (St. Louis, MO), a nonprofit agricultural research institute that is working on rice genetics, says Monsanto's decision to release the data will save researchers three to four years in sequencing the entire rice genome, bringing the project's scheduled completion to around 2004 or 2005. “It's a very good deal,” he says. “I wish someone would do the same for corn and other crops.”

Monsanto, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Pharmacia Corp. (Peapack, NJ), says it is releasing the data so that both it and academic researchers will eventually be able to develop new strains of GM rice that can improve nutrition, tolerate greater cold or heat, or use up less land for cultivation, for example.

Completion of the IRGSP, along with a similar project to sequence the cruciferous plant Arabidopsis thaliana, will allow researchers to identify more effectively the location of genes controlling important traits such as yield or hardiness. “To have the rice genome as a model crop along with Arabidopsis gives us some powerful tools for functional genomics,” says Beachy.

Under the agreement between Monsanto and the IRGSP, any academic researcher can access the data. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF; Tokyo) is leading the IRGSP, and Monsanto's data will be kept on MAFF's computer server. Researchers will need a password to access it, according to Joachim Messing, director of the Plant Genome Initiative at Rutgers University, an IRGSP member.

One researcher, however, wonders why Monsanto doesn't just deposit the information in GenBank, a free Internet-based database that contains genetic sequences from rice, Arabidopsis, and 65,000 other organisms, and is maintained by a division of the US National Institutes of Health. “The thing that concerns me is the access issue,” says Joe Ecker, who is leading the Arabidopsis sequencing project at the University of Pennsylvania. “When it says freely available, that means I can go to GenBank and get it. This [access via IRGSP] is better than not having [the information], but it's not freely available.”

Monsanto's Barry counters that Monsanto is simply trying to restrict potential commercial competitors from using the rice genome information.

However, academic researchers who want to use the information must still agree to give Monsanto first right of refusal to negotiate a nonexclusive license for any patents that result from the data. But Monsanto does not require restrictive “reach-through” rights that require researchers to pay for further uses of the technology—rights that have traditionally been imposed by private companies and academic institutions on proprietary material. “We just want the first option,” says Barry.

Detlef Weigel, a plant biologist at the Salk Institute, points out that a researcher who discovers something of commercial importance using the Monsanto rice data would have to negotiate a deal with Monsanto. “In principle it's fantastic that they [Monsanto] want to make it [the rice data] accessible,” says Weigel. “But we would need to see the details to see how steep the price tag is for discovering something later on.”