In 2022, GENETICS debuted its first annual overview of selected knowledgebases. In continuance of that tradition, this year’s piece will discuss 12 knowledgebase updates with an emphasis on economically important plant Model Organism Databases (MODs).

MODs, which first appeared in the 1990s, are sophisticated knowledgebases that aim to organize and integrate heterogeneous published knowledge for the species of interest in accordance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. 

MODs and strain resources in this issue include PomBase for fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe (Carme et al. 2026); the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center’s curated special collection (Wardet al. 2025); XenBase for Xenopus laevis and X. tropicalis frogs (Chuet al. 2025); and TheArabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) (Reiseret al. 2026) for a non-agronomic plant. These knowledgebases have introduced new tools, updated reference genomes, and enhanced literature curation. PomBase introduces its GO Causal Activity Modelling (GO-CAM) project to connect all proteins into pathways, with the ambitious goal of providing the first curated causal model of a eukaryotic cell. The Caenorhabditis Genetics Center’s (CGC’s) first curated special collection is organised around the biology of protein degradation systems (Ward et al. 2025) and features an interactive discussion forum in partnership with the Alliance of Genome Resources (AGR).

Six articles update MODs for agriculturally important crops. GrainGenes (Yao et al. 2025) makes data on wheat, barley, rye, and oats available to small-grains researchers. SorghumBase (Gladmanet al. 2025) has accelerated the accumulation of genomic, genetic, and phenomic information generated by the sorghum research community and the SorghumBase team. MODs developed by Washington University’s MainLab program include the Genome Database for Vaccinium (Humann et al. 2026), which centralizes genetics, genomics, and breeding data for blueberry, cranberry, bilberry, and lingonberry, and CottonGen (Yu et al. 2025).

Campbell et al. (2026) explain upgrades to three MODs for the legume community: SoyBase, the Legume Information System (LIS), and PeanutBase. These databases continuously evaluate ways to effectively share data among various semi-independently developed database projects and to anticipate and scale to the genomic data tsunami.

The final crop MOD update is for the Maize Genetics and Genomics Database (MaizeGDB) (Haley et al. 2026). MaizeGDB partners with maize researchers to develop and house public resources, including pangenome data. With artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly transforming bioinformatics and MODs, MaizeGDB is evolving from a classical archival resource to an AI-ready platform.

Two additional community-based resources are Mondo and CartograPlant. Mondo (Vasilevsky et al. 2025) standardizes disease terminologies by bringing together disparate resources for cancer and Mendelian, common, infectious, and rare diseases. CartograPlant (Lind et al. 2026) addresses a critical gap linking genotypic, phenotypic, and environmental data from georeferenced plant individuals to advance insights into plant resilience in light of climate change and the surge in invasive pathogens and pests. 

All of the aforementioned knowledgebases are striving to future-proof their resources in response to AI and new research tools and practices, while at the same time fostering collaboration. Despite unstable and decreasing funding, these knowledgebases are rising to the future challenges and are becoming increasingly indispensable resources for their communities.

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