Main Page

About the Planteome Project

The Planteome Project (http://planteome.org/) is a newly-funded (NSF Award #1340112) initiative which will be create a centralized platform where reference ontologies for plants will be used to access cutting-edge data resources for plant traits, phenotypes, diseases, genomes and semantically-queried genetic diversity and gene expression data across a wide range of plant species. The Planteome will develop the Plant Trait Ontology (TO), the Plant Stress Ontology (PSO), and the Plant Environment Ontology (EO) besides taking over the development of Plant Ontology (PO). It will also include relevant aspects of ontologies such as Gene Ontology (GO), Cell type (CL), Chemical Entities (ChEBI), Protein Ontology and the Phenotypic Qualities Ontology (PATO). The Planteome fits into the existing biological ontology landscape, and will be an active participant in the OBO Foundry (http://obofoundry.org/crit.shtml), adhering to all of its principles. We will collaborate with the existing reference ontologies and contribute to their enrichment in terms and definitions of common importance to plant biology.

Specific Aims of the Project:

1. A set of common reference ontologies to describe major knowledge domains of plant biology, comprising plant phenotype and traits, environments, and biotic and abiotic stresses, including plant diseases.

2. Standards, workflows and tools for ontology development, curation and improved annotation of genes, genomes, phenotype and germplasm.

3. An online informatics portal and data warehouse for ontology-based, annotated plant genome data and plant genomes.

4. Smart and semantic data query, analysis, visualization, and community-based annotation and curation tools.

5. Outreach involving K-12 and undergraduate students, and the plant research community.