A reference database for Medicago truncatula genes, proteins, and metabolites

Summary form only given. As a model plant for legumes as well as a rich source of natural products (such as flavonoids, isoflavonoids and triterpenes), Medicago truncatula (Mt) is one of the subjects of current major US genomics initiatives. Nevertheless, data sources of gene, protein, and metabolite in relation to Mt are very limited in publicly available biological databases. Information about genes, proteins, and metabolites is usually distributed among multiple databases. Retrieval and organization of this information can be a laborious task. We present a relational database, B-Net, that is intended to gather information from multiple sources representing genes, proteins, metabolites, and biochemical reactions of Mt. This database represents known facts about the biochemistry of Mt, classified according to the Gene Ontology. We anticipate this new resource to be particularly useful as a reference data set but also a qualitative proteome and metabolome database.