About


Introduction to LegumeSSRdb

Legumes are the second most essential group of crops with around ~700 genera and ~19,000 known Legume species in the world. They are among the few species which can convert nitrogen available in the air to plant usable form and are capable of increasing the nitrogen content in the soil which in turn helps in nitrogen fertilization for other crops. Legumes play a significant role in natural ecosystems, agriculture and agroforestry. They are a very good source of proteins and can be a healthy substitute for meat which is high in fat and cholesterol. Legumes like Phaseolus Vulgaris and Glycine max are staple crops in several parts of America and Asia. Unfortunately, legume crop yields are not growing at a pace which cereals are growing. This is because legumes are often grown after corn and rice and they usually get short growing seasons and frequently face drought issues. While the current trend of water stressed areas in the world is increasing at a rapid pace which is causing a serious threat to legumes. It is importantto study the legumes and come up with solutions to cultivate more drought tolerant legumes. Thus, it is important to understand fundamental mechanisms of these species under different biotic and abiotic stress.

The advancement in Molecular marker technology and Next generation sequencing technologies has increased the scope for crop improvement as it became easier for the researchers to study a species of interest on genome scale. Molecular genetic markers such as the Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) are co-dominant in nature which have a high level of polymorphism, transferability and reproducibility are useful tools for measuring genetic diversity that allows the discovery of connection of hereditary traits with a genomic variation. SSR markers are widespread throughout the genome and also capable of differentiating Homozygotic and Heterozygotic individuals. They are also proven to be efficient in discriminating between the closely related species than other markers like RADP and AFLP.Though RADP markers are time efficient and easy to develop they lack reproducibility, while AFLP has reasonable reproducibility but their operational and development costs are high. Also it is known that SSRs provide more information than SNPs in terms of studying genetic variation and population structure and they are economic as well. Realizing the importance of SSRs, here, we present legumeSSRdb a comprehensive web resource with a wide range of services to aid genetic fingerprinting, genetic diversity analysis, genetic mapping, QTL mapping and Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) to bolster research in legume genomics.

Services

There are seven major features implemented in legumeSSRdb.

  1. Advanced SSR querying
  2. Real time visualization of SSR query statistics
  3. SSR sequence extraction based on custom flanking region
  4. Custom primer design and validation
  5. SSR predictor tool (SSR-web)
  6. Visualization of SSRs using JBrowse
  7. Local NCBI blast