iPlant is a new kind of virtual organization, a cyberinfrastructure (CI) collaborative created to catalyze progress in computationally-based discovery in plant biology. iPlant has created a comprehensive and widely used CI, driven by community needs, and adopted by a number of large-scale informatics projects and thousands of individual users. The project has laid a strong foundation to build an increasingly more capable CI and is poised to have an even greater impact on the plant sciences and a number of related fields, with a new focus on addressing computational bottlenecks for a broad number of life science researchers.
In the next five years, iPlant will continue to enhance the capabilities of a comprehensive CI and will also expand the scope to cover a number of new fields of inquiry. In iPlant's initial phase, Grand Challenge projects were defined to shape community requirements for the design of the CI. The two projects, Genotype-to-Phenotype and the Tree of Life, led to new analytical tools and competences for genomics and evolutionary biology. Future work will advance these capabilities and expand into capture and modeling of phenotypic, environmental, and ecological data. As before, this growth will be motivated by community needs and accomplished by community collaboration.
iPlant will continue to actively partner with other large CI development efforts and will coordinate CI development where feasible, appropriate, and mutually beneficial. iPlant will continue to be the underlying infrastructure provider for a number of projects that provide a variety of bioinformatics services. While continuing to support plant biology discovery research, iPlant will expand scope beyond the plant sciences, in coordination with nascent animal-centered efforts. The project will continue to adapt to the rapidly changing needs of the life sciences community and the rapidly changing technological landscape faced by researchers.
The intellectual merit of the project is in advancing the state of modern biology. Without question, research progress in the plant sciences, and in life sciences more generally, is increasingly limited by data and computational challenges. As knowledge of plant biology increases, the field will progress from informatics-based discovery to predictive modeling and eventually to synthetic biology. A comprehensive CI that eliminates the bottlenecks of data management, data standards, file formats, analysis, efficient collaboration, and knowledge dissemination will be a necessary underlying enabler to achieve this vision, and iPlant is positioned to be this enabling infrastructure.
The broader impacts of the project are numerous. The CI currently supports thousands of end users through its data storage, cloud, and online analytical capabilities. As a service provider, iPlant underlies a number of other online biological information resources. The project will continue its wide-ranging and successful education and outreach efforts, and will teach computational skills to learners at all levels, with particular focus on faculty to enable a sustained culture change that incorporates these advanced skills into the teaching of biology.
