TriticeaeExpDB: a centralized transcriptomic resource for Triticeae research

The Triticeae tribe, encompassing staple crops like bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), and rye (Secale cereale), underpins global food security due to its agronomic importance and genetic diversity. While RNA-seq has revolutionized transcriptome analysis by enabling insights into environmental adaptation, stress response and domestication signature, its potential is limited by data fragmentation, pipeline heterogeneity, and lack of standardization. To address these challenges, we present Triticeae Expression Database (TriticeaeExpDB: https://www.triticeaeexpdb.cn), a comprehensive platform integrating and uniformly reprocessing > 10,000 RNA-seq samples from 528 BioProjects across 17 Triticeae species. The database provides manually curated Triticeae datasets encompassing developmental series, abiotic/biotic stress responses, mutant lines, and experimental genetic population, establishing a high-quality repository for cross-species comparative genomics. Users can query expression profiles using gene identifiers or sequence homology, with results augmented by integrated functional annotations and cross-species ortholog mapping. Advanced toolkits support biological quality control, differential expression analysis, functional enrichment, co-expression network construction, and tissue-specificity evaluation, with interactive visualizations of hierarchical heatmaps, enrichment bubble plots, and network graphs. Custom workflows allow integration of private data with public repositories for comparative analyses. By bridging data accessibility with analytical scalability, TriticeaeExpDB accelerates gene discovery and molecular breeding in Triticeae, serving as both a centralized knowledgebase and an extensible research platform.