Introducing NRSP10: Database Infrastructure for Specialty Crops

National Research Support Project 10 (NRSP10, www.nrsp10.org) “National Database Resources for Crop Genomics, Genetics and Breeding Research” is a newly funded, five-year project aimed at providing standardized database and informatics resources for undeserved or specialty crops such as tree fruit, nuts, and berries. It builds on existing database resources developed for Rosaceae (Genome Database for Rosaceae, www.rosaceae.org), Citrus (Citrus Genome Database, www.citrusgenomedb.org), Vaccinium (Genome Database for Vaccinium, www.vaccinium.org), Cool Season Food Legumes (Cool Season Food Legume Genome Database, www.csfl.org) and Cotton (CottonGen, www.cottongen.org). Developed using Tripal, an open-source, modular, well supported platform, these community databases provide centralized access to integrated genomic, genetic and breeding data and analysis tools for 24 crops representing a combined annual production value of over $25 B. In this presentation we will describe plans and progress to develop and implement additional core infrastructure activities for use in breeding, gene/genome curation, and enabling field and lab-collection and upload of phenotypic data directly into databases via mobile devices as well as developing seamless database-to-database access functionality. Use cases will demonstrate the value of these resources to basic, translational and applied specialty crop research and highlight how these resources can be easily implemented for other horticultural project or community databases.