Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X ConferenceJanuary 12-16, 2002
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Workshop: Bioinformatics/Computers
The SPRIG initiative and WWW site
(http://bioinformatics.org/sprig)
were set up in mid-August 2001 subsequent to a lunchtime Birds
of a Feather lunch meeting by a group of plant-focused
bioinformaticians at the Intelligent Systems in Molecular
Biology (ISMB) 2001 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. We will
likely be affiliated with a proposed SIGPLANT special interest
group of the (ISCB; International Society for Computational
Biology). The concept of SPRIG arose as a result of the
observation that bioinformatics expertise in the plant research
community is highly dispersed, yet the needs, problems and
approaches in various independent plant research groups overlap
heavily with one another. Given the ongoing scarcity in research
resources and bioinformatics personnel, the concept was
envisioned of a loose Consortium of plant focused
bioinformaticians developing a one stop shopping web site of
shared plant-focused bioinformatics resources, such as:
Our site is not species-specific but intended to serve the
entire plant research community including both model organisms
(i.e. Arabidopsis) and plants of agroeconomic interest (i.e.
cereal crops). The SPRIG Consortium follows the open source
democratic model of developers: anyone interested can join and
participate in whatever manner they see fit, within the core
theme of plant bioinformatics.