The Legume Information System and The Legume Federation: Working Together for the Legume-Fed World

The significant increase in genomic and genetic data within the legume family has created tremendous opportunities for making use of cross-species comparative techniques to address concrete problems faced in modern agricultural breeding programs (e.g. increasing yield or introducing disease resistance). Conversely, the explosion of available data characterizing the diversity present within each crop species and its near relatives makes it increasingly difficult for any one group to adequately manage it all. We will present ongoing work aimed at addressing these challenges through a growing federation of groups serving different areas of the legume research community but united through: the adoption of common data and metadata standards, use of common protocols and cyber-infrastructure resources for data sharing, and a firm commitment to shared development efforts. We will demonstrate how we are approaching problems of integration across this diverse and economically important plant family with new tools in development for cross-species comparisons which make use of shared data sets such as the Phytozome gene family models, open source tools such as the Chado/Tripal framework, and common infrastructural resources provided through the iPlant collaborative. Our intent in featuring specific use cases will be to provide an incentive to other groups working within the legumes to consider aligning their efforts with ours, as well as to showcase tools available for adoption by groups working in other clade-based systems.