LettuceGDB: The community database for lettuce genetics and omics

As a globally popular leafy vegetable and a representative plant of the Asteraceae family, lettuce has great economic and academic significance. In the last decade, high-throughput sequencing, phenotyping, and other multi-omics data in lettuce have accumulated on a large scale, thus increasing the demand for an integrative lettuce database. Here, we report the establishment of a comprehensive lettuce database, LettuceGDB (https://www.lettucegdb.com/). As an omics data hub, the current LettuceGDB includes two reference genomes with detailed annotations; re-sequencing data from over 1000 lettuce varieties; a collection of more than 1300 worldwide germplasms and millions of accompanying phenotypic records obtained with manual and cutting-edge phenomics technologies; re-analyses of 256 RNA sequencing datasets; a complete miRNAome; extensive metabolite information for representative varieties and wild relatives; epigenetic data on the genome-wide chromatin accessibility landscape; and various lettuce research papers published in the last decade. Five hierarchically accessible functions (Genome, Genotype, Germplasm, Phenotype, and O-Omics) have been developed with a user-friendly interface to enable convenient data access. Eight built-in tools (Assembly Converter, Search Gene, BLAST, JBrowse, Primer Design, Gene Annotation, Tissue Expression, Literature, and Data) are available for data downloading and browsing, functional gene exploration, and experimental practice. A community forum is also available for information sharing, and a summary of current research progress on different aspects of lettuce is included. We believe that LettuceGDB can be a comprehensive functional database amenable to data mining and database-driven exploration, useful for both scientific research and lettuce breeding.