Biology has become an information science. Common to all of the areas of biology, including plant biology, is the need to collect, store, integrate, analyze, retrieve and disseminate information. To meet this need in the last 30 years, bioinformatics has emerged as a field of research that includes but is not limited to the development of databases, computational analysis, algorithm development, standards, and visualization tools to store, handle and visualize biological data sets. Many of these resources to date have focused on sequence-based data sets which make up the bulk of the available high-throughput analyses, but this landscape is rapidly changing. With advances in technology and the need for translational research, the types and magnitude of the data sets are changing and scaling will require new development, increased collaboration and investment of resources.
Understanding this requirement, cyberinfrastructure has been identified as an area for future investment in several reports including the NSF Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery (www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf0728/index.jsp), National Research Council Report on the "Achievements of the National Plant Genome Initiative and New Horizons in Plant Biology" (http://dels.nas.edu/plant_genome/report.shtml), the National Plant Genome Initiative (NPGI) 5-year plan (www.nsf.gov/bio/pubs/reports/npgi_five_year_plan_2009_2013.pdf) and the EC-US Plant Biotechnology Research 2008. The EC-US Plant Biotechnology Research Working Group identified "building translational pipelines for plant biotechnology" encompassing food, feed and renewable resources as an area for US and EC collaboration. Within this larger objective, the Working Group identified "Cyberinfrastructure" as a key area for collaboration.
In an effort to address EC-US Working Group recommendations, a small workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scientists to discuss existing and future challenges in bioinformatics related to the support of plant biotechnology. The workshop will produce a whitepaper with recommendations for priority areas of joint collaboration in plant bioinformatics research to be disseminated to the broader scientific community.
