Sora (bird) Soras often eat the seeds of plants, such as smartweeds, bulrushes, sedges, and barnyard grasses. Seeds of annual wildrice ("Zizania aquatica") and rice cutgrass are eaten by soras in the eastern United States. A literature review lists crowngrass ("Paspalum" spp.) and rice ("Oryza sativa") as relatively important food sources for soras in the Southeast. Plants comprising <5% of the sora's diet are also listed and include spikerushes ("Eleocharis" spp.), duckweeds (Lemnaceae), pondweeds ("Potamogeton" spp.), panicgrasses ("Panicum" spp.), cordgrasses ("Spartina" spp.), and saltgrass ("Distichlis spicata"). Soras eat more plant food in fall and winter (68%–69%) than in spring and summer (40%).
Plant genome assembly products were used to clone remaining gaps, and YACs allowed the characterization of telomere sequences. The resulting sequenced regions were 115.4 Mb of the 125 Mb predicted size of the genome and a total of 25,498 of protein-coding genes. To sequence and assemble the genome of Oryza Sativa (japonica), the same strategy was used. For Oryza Sativa a total of 3,401 mapped clones in a minimum tiling path were selected from the physical map and assembled. One of the most important crops in the world, maize (Zea mays), is the last plant genome project primarily based on Sanger BAC-by-BAC strategy.