Web portal

The INCREASE Web Portal is a central, web-based platform developed within the INCREASE project to support the collection, curation, exploration and reuse of food legume genetic resources data. It provides open and structured access to high-quality passport, phenotypic and genotypic data for key legume crops, supporting breeders, researchers and the plant genetic resources community.

The portal is embedded in a broader INCREASE data provision ecosystem that also includes international registration systems such as GLIS by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and domain-specific repositories (e.g. e!DAL, Zenodo, ENA). Within this ecosystem, the web portal serves as the main entry point for data search, retrieval, visualisation, and analysis.

An entry page provides general project information and direct access to crop-specific sub-portals. Currently, these sub-portals cover four INCREASE food legumes, common bean, chickpea, lentil and lupin, and allow users to explore data at both accession and dataset level.

• Key functionalities

  Key functionalities of the INCREASE Web Portal include:

  • Exploration of passport data, including detailed accession information and geographic provenance
  • Overview and filtering of phenotypic experiments and associated observations
  • Interactive analysis of genotypic data, including SNP visualisation via DivBrowsea web application for interactive visualization and exploratory analysis of genomic diversity data stored in Variant Call Format (VCF) files of any size.
  • Geographic selection and mapping of accessions
  • Statistical tools such as Principal component analysis (PCA) and the display of selected genome-wide association study (GWAS) results
  • Creation of user-defined working sets ("My Datasets") that combine passport, phenotypic, genotypic, geographic and statistical data for customised analysis and download

• Interoperability and reuse

  To support interoperability and data reuse, the portal enables API-driven data exchange and complies with community standards. It supports BrAPIThe Breeding API (BrAPI) is a Standardised RESTful Web Service API Specification for communicating Plant Breeding Data. BrAPI allows for easy data sharing between databases and tools involved in plant breeding. for passport and phenotypic data and provides MIAPPE-compliant ISA-Tab files for phenotypic datasets, facilitating integration with external tools and platforms.

• Overall contribution

  Overall, the INCREASE Web Portal transforms project-generated data into a findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) resource, contributing to the sustainable use and conservation of food legume genetic resources in European agri-food systems.