The large size and relative complexity of many plant genomes make creation, quality control, and dissemination of high-quality gene structure annotations challenging. In response, we have developed MAKER-P, a fast and easy-to-use genome annotation engine for plants. Here, we report the use of MAKER-P to update and revise the maize (Zea mays) B73 RefGen_v3 annotation build (5b+) in less than 3 h using the iPlant Cyberinfrastructure. MAKER-P identified and annotated 4,466 additional, wellsupported protein-coding genes not present in the 5b+ annotation build, added additional untranslated regions to 1,393 5b+ gene models, identified 2,647 5b+ gene models that lack any supporting evidence (despite the use of large and diverse evidence data sets), identified 104,215 pseudogene fragments, and created an additional 2,522 noncoding gene annotations. We also describe a method for de novo training of MAKER-P for the annotation of newly sequenced grass genomes. Collectively, these results lead to the 6a maize genome annotation and demonstrate the utility of MAKER-P for rapid annotation, management, and quality control of grasses and other difficult-to-annotate plant genomes.Plant genomes, especially grass genomes, are difficult substrates for genome annotation due to regional and whole-genome duplication events and often contain large numbers of pseudogenes. These factors impact every aspect of gene structure annotation, from revision of existing annotations in light of new data to annotation of newly sequenced plant genomes. These aspects of plant genomes also dramatically lengthen compute times, because the many repeated genes and other sequences result in commensurately more sequence alignments and gene predictions. In many ways, annotation of the maize genome epitomizes these problems.In 2005, the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Department of Energy announced that the approximately 2.3-Gb genome of the maize (Zea mays) inbred line B73, a major contributor to much of the germplasm used for U.S. grain production, would be sequenced using a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC)-by-BAC approach. The plan was to sequence BACs from a minimal tiling path to approximately 63 coverage and to further improve only the unique genic regions. These sequences would be labeled Phase