Monascus sp. went fermented on rice, a traditional oriental food commonly known as Hongqu in China and as Red Yeast Rice in the United States. The health- enhancing qualities of this food have been known and used in several Asian countries for more than two thousand years.

Monascus Genome Database is organized into these subject databases:

	Expession Sequence Tag (EST) Database		BAC Shotgun Database
	BAC-end Database		Fosmid-end Database
	Unigene Database		Whole Genome Shotgun Database