Rice has been chosen as the first crop genome sequencing by an international rice genome sequencing consortium, IRGSP (International Rice Genome Sequencing Project) for the following reasons: (1) Rice is an important crop in the world, feeding about one half of the world’s population. (2) Rice genome size, 430 Mb, is the smallest among crops. (3) Rice linkage and physical maps have been established, and over 70,000 EST reported and mostly mapped. Several bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries and P1-derived artificial chromosome (PAC) libraries have also been described. (4) The transgenic technology for rice has been established, and rice has become the easiest of all cereal plants to transform genetically. (5) Rice shares a co-linear gene organization with other cereal grasses, thus rice is a key to knowledge of the genomic organization of the other grasses. Taiwan joins this international effort to decode the rice genomes. The chromosome we work on is number 5. This work is supported by Academia Sinica, National Science Council (NSC), and Council of Agriculture (COA). A central lab for the high-throughput sequencing is localized in Institute of Botany, Academia Sinica, and there are 6 PIs, 3 PDF and 12 assistants. We start from the gene-rich region of short arm. Several PAC clones have been sequenced, annotated and submitted. The URL address of our group is http://biometrics.sinica.edu.tw/genome/index_e.htm. Sequence information, working progress, and related information can be found in our Web site. The mutants caused by insertion of the rice retrotransposon Tos17 at the annotated genes of the sequenced PAC clones are also studied.