Overview

Ruminants are the most successful group of large terrestrial mammals, dominating a wide range of ecosystems and zoogeographic regions. Bovids, in particular, are exceptionally diverse and include several important livestock species: cattle, yak, sheep, and goats. Therefore, ruminants are excellent models for the study of environmental adaptation and economic traits. Ruminant Genome Database (RGD) is an interactive visual website that integrated data from Ruminant Genome Project (RGP) and other public data worldwide. The RGD reports 55 ruminant genomes, whole genome alignments of 55 ruminants and 12 mammals, five scales of conservative evaluation, 1151 samples of RNA-seq data, as well as regulatory regions predicted by utilizing 32 ruminant epigenomic and 726 human epigenomic datasets. The UCSC Genome Browser and geneHeatmap were used to display the large-scale resource. We also set up the UCSC Table Browser, BLAT, and BLAST tools to facilitate in-depth exploration of the ruminant genome sequence features. This comprehensive resource of Ruminantia genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenetics will promote in-depth analysis in biology and evolution of ruminants on a global scale and will be useful for evolutionary biologists and livestock breeders.

(Chen et al.)

Six families (~200 extant species)

Habitat diversity

Important livestocks