Plant & Animal Genomes XIX Conference

January 15-19, 2011
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

The iPlant Collaborative’s Seed Projects: From DNA To The Globe

Martha L Narro¹ , Ivan Baxter² , Brad Boyle³ , Martin Broadley⁴ , Brian Enquist³ , Matthew Hudson⁵ , John McKay⁶ , David Neale⁷ , John Willis⁸ , David Salt⁹

¹  iPlant Collaborative, 1657 E. Helen St., Keating Bldg. Rm 102, University of Arizona, Tucson, 85721, USA

²  USDA, Danforth Center, 975 N. Warson Rd., St. Louis, MO 63132, USA

³  University of Arizona, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, PO Box 210088, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA

⁴  University of Nottingham, School of Biosciences, Room C34 Plat Sciences Division, School of Biosciences, Sutton Bonington Campus, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE12 5RD, United Kingdom

⁵  University of Illinois, Crop Sciences Department, 1101 W Peabody Dr., Urbana, IL 61801, USA

⁶  Colorado State University, Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management, Campus Delivery 1177, FT. Collins, CO 80523 USA

⁷  UC Davis, Department of Plant Sciences, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616 USA

⁸  Duke University, Biology Department, PO Box 90338, Durham, NC 27708 USA

⁹  Purdue University, Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, 625 Agriculture Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2010 USA

Seed Projects are a new way for iPlant to receive collaboration requests from the community, with the goal of developing Grand Challenge projects in new areas by mid to late 2011. The Seed Project strategy was developed in response to community feedback requesting a streamlined process for engaging with iPlant, though holding Grand Challenge Workshops is still an option. Seed Projects are intended to broaden the community iPlant serves and the cyberinfrastructure (CI) it is building by describing additional plant biology challenges that require computational solutions. The working groups at iPlant’s 2010 Conference were invited to submit small Seed Projects that included a CI-related deliverable. As a result, iPlant is now collaborating on four Seed Projects: Botanical Geospatial Diversity (Brian Enquist), Plant Adaptation to Environment (John McKay, John Willis), Plant Nutrition (Ivan Baxter, Martin Broadley, Matt Hudson), and Tree Biology (David Neale). In addition, CI support for geospatially-referenced data was a major, common need for advancing plant science research in these areas; therefore, iPlant is forming a community-lead Geographic Information System (GIS) working group to collaborate with iPlant to scope and develop its GIS infrastructure. This poster describes the deliverables the Seed Project groups will create and iPlant’s preliminary plan for addressing the GIS needs of the plant science community. The CI envisioned and being built by iPlant will help researchers utilize data and models that span scales ranging from molecular and cellular to whole organism to ecosystems, thus enabling understanding of plant biology from DNA to the globe.