What’s New in the Legume Information System and the Federated Legume Database Initiative

Over the last three years, the Legume Information System (http://legumeinfo.org ; LIS) has been redesigned to interoperate with additional websites serving specific legume research communities and to integrate diverse datasets across the crop and model legumes. To integrate datasets, LIS provides genome and map viewers, synteny mappings among all sequenced legume species. Additionally, LIS provides a set of gene families, allowing researchers and breeders to traverse across orthologous, homeologous and paralogous genes and genomic regions among the legumes – both at LIS and other websites. LIS partners with other data resources to help integrate data not housed at LIS (e.g. SoyBase, Phytozome, PeanutBase and others). We will describe how these resources can assist breeders and molecular geneticists in better understanding the physiological and molecular processes of legumes. We will also describe a NSF-funded project nicknamed ‘Legume Federation’ (http://legumefederation.org), highlighting common data formats, data collection templates, and protocols for continuing to build and extend resources relevant to enabling a “legume-fed” world.