TCOD: an integrated resource for tropical crops

Tropical crops are vital for tropical agriculture, with resource scarcity, functional diversity and extensive market demand, providing considerable economic benefits for the world's tropical agriculture-producing countries. The rapid development of sequencing technology has promoted a milestone in tropical crop research, resulting in the generation of massive amount of data, which urgently needs an effective platform for data integration and sharing. However, the existing databases cannot fully satisfy researchers' requirements due to the relatively limited integration level and untimely update. Here, we present the Tropical Crop Omics Database (TCOD, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/tcod), a comprehensive multi-omics data platform for tropical crops. TCOD integrates diverse omics data from 15 species, encompassing 34 chromosome-level de novo assemblies, 1 255 004 genes with functional annotations, 282 436 992 unique variants from 2048 WGS samples, 88 transcriptomic profiles from 1997 RNA-Seq samples and 13 381 germplasm items. Additionally, TCOD not only employs genes as a bridge to interconnect multi-omics data, enabling cross-species comparisons based on homology relationships, but also offers user-friendly online tools for efficient data mining and visualization. In short, TCOD integrates multi-species, multi-omics data and online tools, which will facilitate the research on genomic selective breeding and trait biology of tropical crops. Graphical Abstract