Ontologies for Plant Biology - IBC 2011
Title: The Past, Present and Future: Ontologies for Plant Biology Authors: Pankaj Jaiswal, Justin Elser, Laurel Cooper
As a result of current developments in sequencing technology, the number of sequenced plant genomes is rapidly increasing. Along with the deluge of information on nucleotide and amino acid sequences from a genetically diverse set of species, large quantities of data are also being generated on genes, alleles, their polymorphism, protein functions, transcriptome, proteome and metabolomics experiments, mutants and their phenotypes, metabolic and regulatory interaction networks, and literature references. In the midst of this influx of data, we also realize that few species are being studied in sufficient detail to understand how plants develop, adapt, and diversify. Therefore, experimental annotations generated for a set of well-studied species are being increasingly used to project annotations for lesser-studied species. This demands that the annotations from the well-studied species be generated meeting current genomics/genetics standards and remain up to date all the times. It is, however, time-consuming and laborious for individual researchers to collect information from multiple original data sets and to rearrange it for their own purposes. The concept of ontology has been introduced to biology to support and encourage researchers to share and reuse information among biological databases to foster consistency and use of common vocabulary. Ontology is a kind of glossary that has a built-in hierarchical structure, logical definitions, and relationships among concepts, and is used to define biological processes and environment from the cellular to the organismal level. In the presentation, I will introduce ontology-based annotation strategies being adopted by the new generation of plant genomics and phenomics projects and their role in the discovery environment.
