Introduction of The Asteraceae Database (TAD)

Asteraceae is the largest family of angiosperms, containing about 10% of angiosperms, with more than 1,900 genera and 32,000 species. Asteraceae plants have excellent adaptability, and can be seen in almost every corner of the earth (Figure 1). Plants in Asteraceae also have important economic value. Among them, many are important food resources for humans, such as lettuce and sunflower, many are important horticultural crops, such as chrysanthemums, and many are important traditional herbal medicines, such as Artemisia annua.

Figure 1. Worldwide distribution of Asteraceae plants. The original data are from GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility, https://www.gbif.org/).

The mission of The Asteraceae Database (TAD) is to collect and provide as much data and related information about Asteraceae as possible to promote the research and application of Asteraceae. Specifically, there are three missions. First, striving TAD becomes a research center of Asteraceae Omics in terms of organizing different omics data and providing researchers with convenient data accesses. Second, TAD will be an information center for the phylogeny of Asteraceae species via systematically sorting out the classification information of family, genus, and species, creating ID cards for them and deploying search engine. Third, TAD will turn into a research and knowledge center for understanding the characteristics of Asteraceae, in particular including: 1) the diversity and adaptation; 2) key morphologies (such as flowers); 3) key gene families; 4) specific metabolites, etc.

At the current version of TAD, it includes the multi-omics information of 14 asteraceous plants with whole-genome refereneces, transcriptomes, methylome, small RNA transcriptomes, degradome, epigenome, etc. At the same time, we have carried out a detailed collection of the evolutionary relationship and species information of Asteraceae. So far, it includes information on 50 tribes and 1,634 geneses. Through the research of Asteraceae plants in various fields in the past 20 years, we have gathered knowledge on diversity, adaptation, key morphologies, specific gene families, specific metabolites, etc. In addition, TAD provides a variety of ports for displaying and download the abundant information, and implement convenient search engines for related information.