The Plant Databases consortium aims to facilitate sharing information, expertise and experience between groups developing plant databases.
There are an increasing number of consortia developing plant databases hosting information from genomics through to crop breeding. Rather than develop these systems in isolation, we aim to facilitate the sharing of experience and expertise between groups. The consortium does not promote specific approaches, as these are fluid and it is up to each community to decide what is best for them. However, there are opportunities to learn from each other and establish data standards, enabling comparative analysis between systems.
Each askCrop site brings the data resources for a crop together in one searchable index (genome annotation, gene expression, genotyping, germplasm and links to the literature) and opens them to AI assistants through a public MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Researchers can ask questions in plain language in Claude or another AI assistant and get answers drawn from the source databases, with a link to each record. The data resources behind the sites are listed under Resources.
The sites are free, read-only and need no login. Each has a search page and a guide to connecting an AI assistant. They are in development preview.