Welcome to the lotus genome database
Legumes are important crop plants world-wide ...
With 650 genera and over 16'000 species, legumes are second only to grasses in economic importance in world agriculture. Legumes can be found all over the world; species as soybean in Asia, beans in America and chickpea in the Near East belong to the legume plant family. Beside Medicago truncatula, Lotus japonicus serves as a model organism for the legumes plant family.
Lotus serves as a model organism for plant biology ...
Legumes are unique in their ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen due to the formation of root nodules in which they house symbiotic bacteria, Rhizobia). In contrast to Arabidopsis, Medicago also has the capacity to establish the formation of endomycorrhizae (root endosymbiosis, important in plant mineral nutrition). The importance of legumes to global agriculture and the need to understand these important biological functions not found in existing plant models make M.truncatula exceptionally interesting for sequencing.
Sequencing Lotus opens the road for comparative Legume genomics...
In addition to Medicago truncatula, Lotus is the second Legume species being sequenced. Since both species are closely related (about 40 million years), their genomic sequence along with predicted genes offer a great chance for plant comparative genomics. The MIPS Lotus DB together with the Medicago Genome DB (UrMeLDB) and other plant DBs at MIPS provides a starting point for both Legume-specific and plant comparative analysis.
