743 / 2019-05-15 06:17:47

The Future of Arabidopsis Informatics

Bioinformatics

全体主题 > Omics& New Technology

The Arabidopsis community, and other communities that use Arabidopsis resources in their work, rely on publicly‐shared community resources. Valuable resources include reference genome sequence data and newer resources, with data and tools that are useful for a wide variety of plant science research. The International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium (IAIC) was formed in 2010 by members of the Arabidopsis community after The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) was de-funded. The IAIC's initial focus was to promote the collaborative development of a new and expanded bioinformatics resource ('Araport') that would provide the underlying infrastructure to link and share Arabidopsis resources to the global community. Simultaneously, TAIR became sustainable as a not‐for‐profit organization; TAIR and Araport have thus co‐existed in a complementary manner, the former emphasizing functional annotation, the latter on aggregating large-scale genomic (and other ‘omic) resources. Araport recently lost its core funding; the IAIC sponsored two workshops to plan for next steps that may be needed to ensure informatics continuity and to prevent the loss of valuable bioinformatics resources developed in the Araport project. Key workshop outcomes: a new resource webpage to organize valuable tools and resources, and the decisions that the Thalemine functionality of Araport would move to the BAR (run by the Provart Lab at University of Toronto), while its JBrowse instance would move to TAIR.