Legume introduction
Legumes are one of the most important agriculture taxa worldwide. They contribute 33% of humankinds protein intake, provide a major source of edible and industrial oils, fodder and forage for animals, and are distinguished by their unique property of symbiotic nitrogen fixation which results in a marked increase in the available nitrogen in the biosphere. The major grain crops in Australia are lupin, chickpeas, field peas, lentils, field beans and soybean, which contribute $500million/pa to the national economy. The importance of legumes to the international agricultural community has clearly been demonstrated in the formation of several large genome initiatives in recent years (eg. soybean, field pea, faba bean, alfalfa, lotus and Medicago truncatula).
Bioinformatics is an emerging industry with great potential to expedite biological discovery, however, there are still many challenges to be faced. For example, public sequence data and analytical tools typically reside on different remote servers and use different data input/output formats. Furthermore, inadequate support of internet-based bioinformatics tools by either the host organisation or remote web server may seriously compromise research efforts. Alternatively, the analytical tools may not be useful in their present form for a given analysis.A typical bioinformatics analysis involves the use of several different analytical tools. A simple example would involve data analysis, reformating the analysed data into a format suitable for subsequent analysis, manually transferring the reformated data to the next program and doing the analysis, and so on.... Herein lies one of the major bottlenecks. The responsibility therefore falls on the individual researcher to manage their own bioinformatics strategies for data analysis. Automated multi-pass bioinformatics analysis with the ability to record and update each step in the process is now recognised as essential for enabling information discovery. This is important in order to reproduce results and for redoing the experiment in light of newly available data.
