Table I.

Comparison of maize, rice, and Arabidopsis gene statistics

Features	Maize	Rice Genomea	Arabidopsisb
Total no. of clones	100	3,401	1,578
Average length (kb)	144 (23–227)	n/a	n/a
Total length (Mb)	14.38	n/a	132.9
Minimal tile (Mb)	n/a	370.7	117.3
Predicted genes	330	37,544	29,084
Predicted exons	1,520	175,203	142,512
Average no. of exons per gene	4.6	4.7	4.9
Average intron size (bp)	607	413	167
Average exon size (bp)	259	254	217
Average gene size (kb)c	4.0d	2.7	2.0
Average exon density/100 kb	11		122.5
Average gene density (kb per gene)	43.5	9.9	4.0
G + C content
Overall	46.5%	43.6%	35.9%
Exons	55.4%	54.2%	43.8%
Introns	42.3%	38.3%	32.6%
Intergenic regions	46.0%	42.9%	31.7%
Protein-coding DNA	55.4%		44.0%

^aInternational Rice Genome Sequencing Project, (2005).

^bNumbers derived from MAtDB, released September 2004 (Schoof et al., 2004).

^cLength from the start codon to the stop codon.

^dAverage gene size for all 330 genes (including partial gene models at the end of BACs) is 3 kb.