Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Workshop: Bioinformatics Interfaces, Ontologies and Interoperability
            

DEVELOPMENT OF Plant Ontologies™ FOR Oryza, Arabidopsis AND Zea: AN OVERVIEW

¹ Department of Plant Breeding, Bradfield Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

² The Arabidopsis Information Resource, 260 Panama St., Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

³ Missouri Maize Project, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Missouri, 65211-7020, USA

⁴ Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724, USA

⁵ International Rice Research Institute, 6776 Ayala Ave., Makati City, The Philippines

The goal of the Plant Ontology™ Consortium is to produce structured controlled vocabularies that can be used to describe plant development and anatomy. The partner databases, GRAMENE, TAIR and MaizeDB, representing the three model plant taxa Oryza (rice), Arabidopsis thaliana and Zea mays (maize), are currently developing ontologies for the annotation of plant anatomy  (organs, tissues and cell types) and growth stages. Complementing the Gene Ontology™ (GO) and Trait Ontology™ (TO), development and integration of Plant Ontologies™ (PO) is expected to support complex queries within databases to search for when, where and how in a plant the gene product and its associated phenotype is expressed, localized and evaluated. The implementation of these common vocabularies across databases will facilitate the identification of gene products among the different plant taxa with similar annotations. Groups of such gene products may prove useful in addressing questions about the evolution and diversification of plants. In the workshop, we will try to address the issues on Plant Ontology™ development and its integration in the participating databases.