The initialization of The Asteraceae Database (TAD)

It was a special time when the Covid-19 delayed almost every aspect of life. The face-to-face meeting of the initialization of Asteraceae Database was finally held on Oct 10^th 2020, even though the group leaders including Dr. Guangyuan Rao (from Peking University), Dr. Tiangang Gao (from IBCAS, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Dr. Xiaozeng Yang (from BAAFS, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences) have discussed a couple of times online. Beside the team leaders, Assistant professor Dr. Fei Shen, Postdoc Dr. Bo Li and Graduate students, Zhonglong Guo, Baihan Jiao and Jiahao Shen also attended the meeting.

At the meeting, the group discussed the Mission of Asteraceae Database, and formed the following three parts that all aim to speed up the research on Asteraceae.

1)    Be a research center of Omics for plants in Asteraceae. The Asteraceae Database will organize the genomes, transcriptomes and other omics information of all Asteraceae plants, and provide a good data access and retrieval port.

2)    Become an information center for the classification of Asteraceae. The Asteraceae Database will organize the classification information of Asteraceae plants systematically, file the information of subfamily, genus, and species, and provide friendly access and retrieval ports.

3)    Incubated as research and knowledge center for understanding the characteristics of Asteraceae plants and sorting out the following knowledge areas: a) understanding the diversity and adaptability of Asteraceae plants; 2) understanding the key forms (such as flowers) of Asteraceae plants; 3) understanding of key gene families; 4) understanding the specific metabolites of Asteraceae plants, etc.

Meanwhile, the models and content for each model were discussed, and an outline was come out as the following figure.