The Cool Season Food Legume Database: An Integrated Resource for Basic, Translational and Applied Research

The Cool Season Food Legume Genome Database (http://www.coolseasonfoodlegume.org) is being developed to assist in translating genomics into crop improvement of the cool season food legumes, Pisum sativum (pea), Lens culinaris (lentil) and chickpea (cicer arientinum). The database is built using Tripal which provides simplified site development by merging the power of Drupal, a popular web Content Management System (CMS), with that of Chado, a community derived database schema for storage of genomic, genetic and other biological data. EST unigenes are available for pea, chickpea and lentil and the whole genome sequence and annotation of chickpea has also been added. The predicted genes of the whole genome sequences and unigenes have been annotated by homologous genes in other species, InterPro protein domains, GO terms and KEGG pathway terms, to provide users with putative pathways and traits in which they are involved. The annotated sequence data can be browsed through species page or queried using various categories in the search sites. In GBrowse, users can view the whole genome sequence and annotation data of chickpea as well as those of other model legumes: Medicaco, soyben and lotus. We have also developed search sites for markers and QTL so that users can search the data using various categories.