POC-MorphoBank Webex meeting 07-05-2011

In attendance:

POC members: Laurel Cooper (OSU), Pankaj Jaiswal (OSU), Ramona Walls (NYBG)

Collaborators:

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss potential collaboration between the Plant Ontology and Morphobank.org.

Background

Morphobank

Current utility, goals, etc.

MorphoBank is a web application for conducting phylogenetics or cladistics research on morphology that enables teams of scientists to work over the web - in real time - and to do research they could not easily do using desktop programs alone.

MorphoBank displays dynamic phylogenetic matrices of morphological characters with labeled images demonstrating homology statements, and implements the data editing functions of widely used desktop programs (e.g., Mesquite, Nexus Data Editor) over the web in a password protected environment. It is an environment for virtual collaboration by teams of researchers building phylogenetic matrices with affiliated image data.

MorphoBank can also draw on images in existing 2D and 3D digital libraries. If a scientist has images that are not deposited in other digital libraries, MorphoBank uses its database to store images (including films and CT scans) submitted by scientists, and allows contributors to label anatomical structures on the images. MorphoBank records metadata for the images.

Future directions

??

PO

Current utility, goals, etc.

Goals (from current grant):

• Develop and enrich the PO to describe plant anatomy and developmental stages of all plants including bryophyte, pteridophytes, and gymnosperms, as well as angiosperms

• Develop the PO as reference ontology of plant structures and growth stages by developing mappings to similar vocabularies in use by plant databases

• Outreach and education activities to extend the PO usage and awareness about Plant Biology research

Current uses:

Primarily used by model organism databases to associate gene expression and phenotypic variation to plant anatomical entities or plant growth and development stages.

Used in genomic analysis tools (e.g., VirtualPlant, eFP Browser) to aggregate data according to ontological rules.

Future directions

• Provide the vocabulary needed for phenotypic descriptors (qualities, as well as entities), by enriching the PO or PATO with quality terms. This is needed for:

-description of mutant phenotypes or natural variation for genetic or genomic research

-description of systematic/phylogenetic characters

• Provide user-friendly tools for online data curation using ontologies such as the PO. Is this correct?

Ideas and question re. collaboration between PO and Morphobank

Graphical interface for entering systematic data using ontologies

Morphobank provides software to store data (specimen data, images, etc.) and create character matrices based on ontology terms.

PO provides EQ (entity-quality) data for plants.

From MO: "If you were to describe what would be an ideal tool or link, can you say what that would be? In other words, we are familiar and comfortable working in the matrix environment, if we were to open that matrix or character list, what tool or function would be ideal to link to PATO (and PO or other anatomy ontologies)?"

Links to images

Adding links to images for PO terms is a priority of the PO now. Morphobank has an image data base. Can we set up links between PO terms and Morphobank images?

Need a stable url in standard format for individual images, to set up as dbxref in GO database file.

References and Links

Phenoscape

Dahdul et al. 2010 - Paper on using EQ statements to describe legacy data set of morphological characters for fish.

NeXML