WheatIS: A Genetics and Genomics Information System for the Wheat Research Community

In 2011, the G20 ministers of agriculture mandated the Wheat Initiative to coordinate worldwide research efforts for wheat improvement. Under its umbrella, the WheatIS Expert Working Group was set up in 2013 to build an international wheat information system, called WheatIS (wheatis.org).

We present here the WheatIS conceived as distributed information system, acting as a hub for integrating wheat data produced and submitted to the public repositories. It relies on a network of 12 bioinformatics platforms working synergistically to provide an easy access to wheat data. These platforms, each considered as a WheatIS node, share their resources and propose several dedicated integrative databases, e.g. for genomic, genetic, and phenotype information, comparative genomics, and functional genomics. The hub, wheatis.org, provides centralized access to (i) the nodes and their resources, (ii) recommended data standards, (iii) a file repository to deposit and share the data among the scientific community, and (iv) a search in distributed databases for an easy data discovery.