The Medicago truncatula Genome: Genomic Data Availability

Abstract

Medicago truncatula emerged in 1990 as a model for legumes, comprising the third largest land plant family. Most legumes form symbiotic nitrogen-fixing root nodules with compatible soil bacteria and thus are important contributors to the global nitrogen cycle and sustainable agriculture. Legumes and legume products are important sources for human and animal protein as well as for edible and industrial oils. In the years since M. truncatula was chosen as a legume model, many genetic, genomic, and molecular resources have become available, including reference quality genome sequences for two widely used genotypes. Accessibility of genomic data is important for many different types of studies with M. truncatula as well as for research involving crop and forage legumes. In this chapter, we discuss strategies to obtain archived M. truncatula genomic data originally deposited into custom databases that are no longer maintained but are now accessible in general databases. We also review key current genomic databases that are specific to M. truncatula as well as those that contain M. truncatula data in addition to data from other plants.

Cloning and Functional Analysis of Dwarf Gene Mini Plant 1 (MNP1) in Medicago truncatula

“…Legumes are the third largest family of angiosperms, including many important crops, such as soybeans and peanuts [ 44 ]. To gain a better understanding of the molecular basis of plant height regulation in legumes, we screened the Tnt1 retrotransposon insertion mutant collection of the model plant M. truncatula [ 45 ] to isolate mutants with significant changes in plant height.…”

Genomic diversification of dehydrin gene family in vascular plants: three distinctive orthologue groups and a novel KS-dehydrin conserved protein motif

“…Their analysis, however, did not include DHNs of the KS group, presumably due to the difficulty of retrieving these sequences using the Pfam motif PF00257. To verify whether DHNs containing the H-segment would also be part of a syntenic community, we compared 40 genes surrounding the unique H-DHN of the basal angiosperm, Amborella trichopoda to the genomic neighbourhoods of H-DHN loci of the waterlily Nymphaea colorata 51 , the basal eudicot sacred locus, Nelumbo nucifera 52 , the legume Medicago truncatula 53 , the model plant A. thaliana (HIRD11) 54 and the monocot grass Sorghum bicolor 55 . All of these species possess only one H-dehydrin paralogue except for M. truncatula, which has two (Supplementary Table 1).…”

Alfalfa Growth under Changing Environments: An Overview

“…This science was established and developed many hundreds of years ago and still receives a large amount of effort, including original articles, reviews and books (examples of recent books: Beck 2010; Maiti et al 2012;Steeves and Sawhney 2017;Crang et al 2018). These efforts have real potential or importance in different fields, in particular the environmental and agricultural sciences (e.g., Carriquí et al 2019;Farooq et al 2019;Lisztes-Szabó 2019;Zhong et al 2019). Therefore, understanding of the plant's anatomy may guarantee sound knowledge of the plant's structural components and the function of each component.…”

“…Apart from Medicago sativa, there are many members in theMedicago genus such asMedicago truncatula. M. truncatula could be considered a model legume due to its small genome (50-550 Mbp; Gholami et al 2014), short life cycle (about 3 months) and its ability to pollinate through both self-crossing and outcrossing (Burks et al 2018;Roque et al 2018). The members of theMedicago genus are characterized by their ability to produce many bioactive natural compounds, which can join in symbiotic interactions to preventattacks from herbivores and pathogens.…”

“…The plant genome database is considered a storage platform system, in which more data could be included due to the rapid development of bioinformatics . The genome of Medicago speciesinvolving alfalfa has been investigated by many researchers recently,including exploring the structural variation in 15 Medicago genomes and their gene family (Zhou et al 2017), genetic progress in alfalfa forage quality through mapping and genomic selection (Biazzi et al 2017), the availability of genomic data (Burks et al 2018), the sequenced angiosperm genomes and itsdatabase , alfalfa genomic prediction for 25 quality and agronomic traits , the discovery of theplastome traits within Medicago species (Choi et al 2019), and improving the yield potential of alfalfa via quantitative trait loci mapping .…”