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 (Medicago truncatula), a species closely related to alfalfa, is widely considered the preeminent model for genomic research. Medicago has a small genome of approximately 470 million base pairs with the genome space organized into separate gene-rich and 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 were sequenced by U.S. laboratories under the NSF project "Sequencing the Gene Space of the Model Legume, Medicago Truncatula," 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 has created a database providing access to Medicago EST, BAC end, and BAC sequences from all sequencing projects and to annotations generated both at JCVI and by the IMGAG. Additional resources in the database include comparative views of other legumes, microarray annotations and pointers to Medicago and other transcript assemblies.
Funding