Medicago truncatula Database
Overview
With over 20,000 species, legumes are one of the most important crop families in the world in terms of nutritional value, health benefits, and being a food staple, especially within developing countries. Legumes are unique in their ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen through symbiosis with bacteria known as Rhizobia and they contain high levels of protein. Among legumes, Medicago truncatula, a species closely related to alfalfa, has been widely adopted as a model for genomic research. M. truncatula has a small genome of approximately 500 million base pairs with the genome space organized into separate euchromatic gene-rich and heterochromatic gene-poor regions.
A consortium of labs in the United States and Europe has sequenced the genome of M. truncatula. Six of Medicago's eight chromosomes have been sequenced by U.S. laboratories under two rounds of NSF funding and two were sequenced by colleagues in the European Union. JCVI has sequenced chromosomes 2, 7 and is also part of the International Medicago Genome Annotation Group (IMGAG). JCVI maintains databases that provide access to all Medicago genome, EST and BAC end sequences and to both the official IMGAG annotation, various classes of supporting evidence and other genome-related data sets such as expression and mutant data. Additional resources in the database include comparative views of other legumes, microarray annotations and pointers to Medicago and other transcript assemblies.
Funding
National Science Foundation (NSF) awards #0321460, #0604966, and #0821966