Legume Federation

The legume family (Fabaceae) contains many important food and forage crops. The large number of research groups has resulted in many different web data and analysis resources whereas the small size of many of the research groups for individual crops leave those groups without readily-available data resources. In addition, the taxonomic relatedness of these crop species enable comparative research in which researchers working with less well-studied species can take advantage of well-studied species like soybean and Medicago truncatula. The Federated Plant Database Initiative for the Legumes (IOS #1444806) is an NSF-funded project to address these issues by developing collaborations between existing web resources to enable sharing of code, data, and processes, by providing support for developing web resources for small research groups, and by taking advantage of knowledge and methods outside the legumes with collaborations with non-legume web resources like MaizeGDB, and CottonGen. Although a major focus of the project is on methods for distributed data and development, we emphasize that the fundamental mission is to enable improved agricultural productivity for this important group of crop plants by integrating genetic, genomic, and phenotypic data across species to enable identification of common molecular bases for important traits.

Back to: Interoperability and Federation Across Bioinformatic Platforms and Resources

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