I. FOREWORD
at last... (21 Sep 95)

We thank you for your patience. It is reassuring when, despite reason to be impatient, colleagues simply inquire about your summer's crop, or about the progress of your other activities, or whether their subscription has lapsed, and do not suggest lassitude. MNL is still an important item in libraries also, shown by followups asking about the status of their subscriptions (no doubt some library user has asked). Please accept my personal apology for the long delay in this issue, caused by a combination of illness of the key achiever of the work with an extraordinary volume and depth of material to be redacted and synthesized; we hope you will find the quality and quantity of the content here help to make up. PLEASE SEE ESPECIALLY THE FOLLOWING:

The MaizeDB section
The Probe Bank section
The new UMC Core Map and the new (60-year) synthesis of the Genetic Map, matched to it
The table of improved Core Markers
The table of cDNA identifications
The current RFLP Map from Brookhaven National Laboratory

The 'Cooperation' exists because you are a 'Cooperator' in keeping up the tradition of sharing maize genetics information with colleagues, here and in many unheralded conversations, correspondence, and shared stocks. Among my treasured paradigms are memories of how freely and enthusiastically their ideas and their stocks were shared, supplemented by helpful details, by our colleagues such as Barbara McClintock, Charles Burnham, John Laughnan, among many, and the theme continues. The working research information here is shared with the understanding that each item is unpublished and is not to be cited in publications without specific consent of the authors. By sharing our research information, we contribute to the advancement of biology and to the power of shared technical knowledge.
Information here is in the form of "notes" and is not "published" in the sense of a refereed journal. Cooperators emphasize presentation of brief technical notes, updates, mutants, segregation ratios, tables of mapping data, clones, biochemical functions, and the like. Comprehensive material and analyses are better directed to formal publication.
More and more cooperators supply notes, tables and figures in electronic form, and this greatly facilitates editing and compiling.

Gifts to the Endowment Fund for support of the Newsletter now total about $90,000. Please see the listing, in the front of this issue, of donors whose generosity has made this total grow. We are all grateful for the support of our colleagues and of organizations with which we have common interests.
The continuity and support necessary for collecting genetic and molecular information, evaluating it, and preparing gene lists, maps, and similar syntheses are made possible only by sustained and ongoing encouragement of this work within the Agricultural Research Service. The MaizeDB project has advanced, through the efforts of Dr. Jerry Miksche, from a temporary to a regular, ongoing project; please note the section on MaizeDB, including access, content, and goals, provided by our new Curator, Dr. Mary Polacco. We urge you with our strongest enthusiasm to use, assess, and contribute to the database.

Mary Polacco ingeniously contrived and "dumped" the Gene List and reference links; Zealand 95 and reference links; the Stock List; and author and symbol indexes from MaizeDB, aided by the skillful savvy of Denis Hancock and Shirley Kowalewski. Help, advice and ideas also from my colleagues Mike McMullen, who reviewed and helped refine the whole, and Pat Byrne and Georgia Davis, who compiled, summarized, and evaluated contents, are warmly appreciated. Shirley Kowalewski, during recovery from a protracted illness, skillfully made the contents into fine form, twisted diverse electronic sources to suit and interpreted exotic scripts, structured the year's literature and indexes, and questioned quality or content, or gave creative advice, at key moments. Thanks are also given to Lou Butler for helping get the Newsletter copy edited and moving forward at critical stages. At University Printing Services, Yvonne Ball and the printshop staff again efficiently ensured the job was done promptly and well.

For submission of notes for the next issue (Number 70, 1996), please see details inside the back cover.
If you wish to subscribe to this Newsletter please use the form in the back of this issue. Gifts to the Endowment Fund, toward our goal of $100,000, will be very much appreciated.

Details about the 1996 Maize Genetics Conference at Pheasant Run, in St. Charles, Illinois, March 14-17, 1996, will be mailed to former attendees in November 1995; others may request the mailing by providing their address to Coe. The program and abstracts are provided by Bill Sheridan. The Steering Committee for the 1996 Maize Genetics Conference is:

Mary Alleman Jeff Bennetzen Paul Chomet (Chair)
Curt Hannah Tim Helentjaris Barbara Kloeckener
Paul Sisco Sue Wessler Udo Wienand

Editor Coe

Please Note: Notes submitted to the Maize Genetics Cooperation Newsletter may be cited only with consent of the authors

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