Marigold (Tagetes erecta L.) is the well-known, widely grown ornamental plant belonging to Asteraceae family. The genus Tagetes comprises more than 50 species, among them Tagetes erecta L. (African marigold; 2n = 2x = 24), T. patula L. (French marigold; 2n = 2x = 48) are commercially cultivated. It has lucrative industrial importance due to the abundance source of carotenoid lutein in its petals, which is used in pharmaceuticals, natural dyes, insecticides or herbicides, as feed additives, etc. Due to their short production cycles, marigolds are considered ideal for growing in a multi-crop system, rotated with other crops, or as a mixed crop, successfully integrated into organic agriculture. It also holds great potential in the phytoremediation of different heavy metals such as cadmium, copper, and zinc. African Marigold (Tagetes erecta L.), native to Mexico and South America, is widely used as a potted plant, a landscaping plant, and a cut flower.

The marigold genomic information of this unexplored crop has wider avenues to deeply study the genetic mechanism of lutein biosynthesis. Despite its nutritional, economic, and industrial importance, very limited genetic and genomic information is reported in this genus. The complete chloroplast genome of T. erecta assembled and characterized by Zhang et al. in 2019 estimated its size to be 152,055 bp. Also, the chromosome-scale genome assembly of marigold by Xin et al. in 2023 was of 707.21 Mb, consisting of 35,834 annotated protein-coding genes, with 97.7% genomic integrity.

This genomic resource of marigold microsatellite database, named MgSatDB catalogues the genome-wide SSR markers from three genome assemblies (viz., GCA_026213115.1 and GCA_030867185.1 (for African Marigold) and GCA_026259685.1 (for French Marigold)) along with the primer generation and polymorphic markers in Tagetes erecta mined using the in-house perl scripts. A total of 153,281 SSR loci and 57,042 polymorphic markers are catalogued here. MgSatDB is based on three-tier architecture consisting of client, middle, and database tiers developed using MySQL database, HTML, and PHP. The various customized search options will be instrumental for horticulture sciences for future marigold breeding and improvement programs.