Introducing the Brassica Information Portal: Towards Integrating Genotypic and Phenotypic Brassica Crop Data

A new community resource, the Brassica Information Portal (BIP), provides an open access web repository for Brassicaphenotyping data (https://bip.earlham.ac.uk). It aims to fill the gap between physical genome information and quantitative phenotypic information. By liking standardised trait data with genotypic and phenotypic information, it will in the near future offer tools to perform on-the-fly phenotype-genotype association analysis.

In collaboration with the UK Brassica Research Community, we have built a tool that aims to assist global research on Brassica crops: Users can store and publish their own study results in the Portal thanks to advanced data submission capabilities. Similarly, user-friendly interfaces and programmatic download mechanisms further facilitate work with the data. This makes the database content readily comparable and cross-linkable to that of other tools and resources for further downstream analysis.

We also aim to implement community-wide phenotypic trait definition standards to encourage trait data re-use. To ensure comparability, we are working on creating Brassica trait ontology terms based on the Crop Ontology model suitable for association analysis.There are huge benefits from making organised trait data available and accessible to the Brassicacommunity and we hope that it becomes common practice to store brassica trait data systematically and share it with the wider research community in a similar way as has become routine for sequence, transcript, metabolite and protein structure data. We will present the resource and a use-case to demonstrate BIP’s value and utility, both for single research groups and global Brassicaresearch and breeding community.