Legumes play vital roles in maintaining nitrogen cycle of biosphere and in agriculture for nitrogen fixation by their unique ability to carry out symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF) through endosymbiotic interactions with bacteria in root nodules. This vital feature can't be studied by using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Besides the root nodulation and symbiotic nitrogen fixation with rhizobia, legumes possess several unique features that are not found in A. thaliana, such as mycorrhization, compound leaf development, protein-rich physiology, a profuse secondary metabolism, glandular trichome development, and border cells in roots.

LegumeIP is an integrative database and bioinformatics platform for comparative genomics and transcriptomics to facilitate the study of gene function and genome evolution in legumes, and ultimately to generate molecular based breeding tools to improve quality of crop legumes.

LegumeIP currently hosts large-scale genomics and transcriptomics data, including:

• Genomic sequences of three model legumes, i.e. Medicago truncatula, Glycine max (soybean) and Lotus japonicus, including two reference plant species, Arabidopsis thaliana and Poplar trichocarpa, with the annotation based on UniProt TrEMBL, InterProScan, Gene Ontology and KEGG databases. LegumeIP covers a total 222,217 protein-coding gene sequences.
• Large-scale gene expression data compiled from 104 array hybridizations from L. japonicas, 156 array hybridizations from M. truncatula gene atlas database, and 14 RNA-Seq-based gene expression profiles from G. max on different tissues including four common tissues: Nodule, Flower, Root and Leaf.
• Systematic synteny analysis among M. truncatula, G. max, L. japonicus and A. thaliana.
• Reconstruction of gene family and gene family-wide phylogenetic analysis across the five hosted species. LegumeIP features comprehensive search and visualization tools to enable the flexible query on gene annotation, gene family, synteny, relative abundance of gene expression.