POC Conf. Call 10-13-10

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POC meeting, Webex Conference Call; Date: Oct 13th, 2010 10am (PDT)

In attendance:

POC members:

Absent:

Collaborators:


Acceptance of the minutes from the 10-6-10 meeting?


Status and Update of Progress: PO Release

An announcement will be sent directly to the direct user groups.

We will send the email to the 'contact' email address at each of these groups, or the contact people at these groups, if we do not have a generic email.


Open SF tracker items Plant Structure Ontology

Oldest tracker items

These items have been on the SF tracker between 8 months and two year. None of them are controversial. Suggest that all curators take a look at each SF item and comment on whether or not they agree with the suggestions below. That way, we can devote our meeting time to more difficult terms.


dispersed meristematic cell (2007-02-14, donghui) – see proposed solution on SF

pericarp vascular bundle (2007-03-16, cwtung) – okay to add

rhizome internode (2007-08-03, cmungall) – okay to add

peripheral vein or tertiary vein (2008-02-07, anon) – reject and close

adaxial vs. abaxial structures (2008-02-18, rdidonat) – suggest adding the terms

shoot vascular system (2008-11-14, donghui) – suggest adding

ovary septum vs. carpel septum (2009-04-27, donghui) – add as synonym of carpel septum, maybe open new tracker item for carpel septum develops_from carpel wall

create chickpea related terms (2009-05-19, cwtung) – These are actually terms for types of branches or shoot systems; first deal with re-organizing shoot system

trichome parentage (2009-12-17, cmungall) – need to come back to this when we figure out how to deal with trichomes

terms without definitions (stylar ridges) (2010-02-26, rwalls) – part of meristem – We need to deal with the organization of meristem first, then come back to these terms

Newer tracker items

We need to prioritize the following items:

  • Adding Musa terms requested by Rosemary Shrestha (July 2010)


  • Root terms

-Adding/modifying the root terms submitted by Rich Zobel (Nov 2009).

We (sort of) dealt with the upper level root terms that Rich requested: basal root, primary root (taproot), shoot-borne root, but we still need to deal with the rest. Includes 3 new terms: internode root, non-pericyclic lateral root, non-pericyclic basal root.

He also suggested modifications to the definitions of the following additional 14 terms: List of root terms

-adventitious root- this was flagged for consideration during the revision of shoot-borne root (PO:0000042)


Taproot, Stem Hair, Prickles, Fascicle, Bristle (used in key as "Stipules spinose or bristles"; might be thought of as a quality, rather than a structure), Phyllode, Banner (as in a legume flower), Wing (as in a legume flower), Keel (as in a legume flower), Anther pore and anther slit, Locule


  • New terms requested by reviewers (from Ahrestani, Kramer and Rudall)

-Elena Kramer suggested that we add the term spur to the PSO and consider dealing with common primordia in the PGDSO.

-Paula Rudall commented that the current definition of central cell has a different meaning in gymnosperms.

-TraitNet requested several new terms for the PSO: corm, spine, podarium, pneumatophore, stele, diaspore, cone, sorus, and tendril.


Need a class primordium, and need to make one definition for it. Also need to organize primordium terms

We may also want to link primordia to stages in the PGDSO, where appropriate.

For example, ovule primordium (PO:0000018) participates in ovule primordium visible (PO:0007620) or ovule primordium visible (PO:0007620) has_participant ovule primordium (PO:0000018).


  • reorganization of shoot system

We started working on this during the last round of revisions (with bud, and terms like reproductive shoot system), but it still needs some tweaking. Need to discuss vegetative shoot system.


Open SF tracker items Plant Growth and Development Stage Ontology

gametophytic phase and sporophytic phase

These were moved to be children of whole plant growth stage (PO:0007033) and the term "plant life cycle phase (PO:0028001) was obsoleted for now till we have further discussion on it.


Also, the top class in the ontology is 'plant growth and developmental stage(s)' def'n = The succession of changes leading from the zygote to the mature plant- that is only the sporophytic phase.

We should rethink the entire upper level structure of the PGDSO, and how we can incorporate all plants

tuber growth and development stages

open on SF since 6/2009


post harvest stages

Plans for a publication to detail the updates in the PO

-This is a priority for the fall to detail the changes in the PSO

-We have been keeping track of the changes on the 'Summary of Changes' page

-Target journal: Current Opinions in Plant Biology or Plant Physiology


POC meeting to be held at NYBG in fall 2010. Date Nov 4-6th

Date: Thursday Nov 4th (LC and RW), all day on Friday, November 5th and Sat Morning, Nov 6th

  • Wiki page for the meeting has been created. We will be adding items to this over the next few weeks
  • Should we invite outside experts, scientists, students and postdocs? Time to do so is getting short.

-Farshid Ahrestani from TraitNet has been invited, can also invite Dan Bunker (both from NJIT in Newark, so could attend for only a few hours without too much travel)

-Bruce Kirchoff? He would have to travel from South Carolina. It might be better too just organize a conference call.

-Folks from the NYBG- review the PGDSO and comment on terms from non-angiosperms. Suggestions?

Re-organization of PGDSO?

Other Items

  • Fall exhibition at NYBG- DWS: ask PJ about the details of this?

From the grant:

(2) Dr. Stevenson, a co-PI from NY Botanical Garden (NYBG), will involve PO project in the ongoing outreach activities of the NYBG in developing Plant Biology tools for 6-12 teachers in NY City public schools as well as the general public and education programs at NYBG for K-12. NYBG being a Museum gives us an opportunity to reach out to parents and students alike and in ways that a university setting like Cornell may not provide. He will organize three annual exhibitions (one per year) at NYBG.

Deliverables: Years 2-4: Student workshop at NYBG.


*Update from Alejandra about images for the PO

Ramona will go to Ithaca on Oct. 20th to work with Alejandra on loading images onto Plantsystematics.org and linking them with the PO. We will work on technical aspects of this during the conference call that day.


*Question from Daniel Lang <daniel.lang@biologie.uni-freiburg.de> (to Pankaj Sept 2009)

"I am looking for estimates of the number of cell types and the number of different tissue types in the gametophytic and sporophytic generations of the following angiosperms:

Arabidopsis lyrata, Arabidopsis thaliana, Carica papaya, Glycine max, Medicago truncatula, Populus trichocarpa, Ricinus communis, Vitis vinifera, Oryza sativa, Sorghum bicolor and Zea mays (current estimate: total 100 cell types)

I've already tried to extract part of this data using the plant_structure associations from the database dump, but I am unsure whether the annotations are comprehensive enough to give a reliable answer?

PO term associations including transitive indirect annotations: Arabidopsis thaliana gametophyte 10 Arabidopsis thaliana sporophyte 229 Oryza sativa gametophyte 4 Oryza sativa sporophyte 145 Zea mays gametophyte 2 Zea mays sporophyte 42


I would be excited to hear your estimates/data on this! Do you know of any web resources, literature or databases that would help us answer these questions?

To conserve the data for future use, I will post the numbers to BioNumbers (http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu)."

Has anyone responded to him??

Dennis and Ramona should report back at this meeting.


  • Setting up conference call with Bruce Kirchoff to discuss the Plant Ontology and the issues he raised at the Botany Meeting

His comments: "I hope you understand that my comments were not directed at you, or the work that you are doing with the plant ontology. I do understand the need for the ontology, at least from a database perspective, and I think that the improvements that you and the plant ontology group have made to the initial ontology are important, and substantial. However, I feel that there are still serious problems with any attempt to bring all aspects of plant morphology together under a unifying ontology. Perhaps the word "ontology" was coined for these controlled vocabularies with tongue-in-cheek, but the attempts to extend the ontology beyond their use in databases tends to remove the jest, at least in my opinion. I very much believe in open discussion as a way of advancing science. It was for this reason that I convinced the Botanical Society to institute the discussion sections that now are a standard part of the annual program. I would be interested in continuing the discussion of plant trait ontology at the next botanical society meetings, in a discussion session. Perhaps you and your colleagues would be interested in organizing one of these sessions with me."


This was scheduled to be done after Sept 20th, so we should probably decide when we want to do it.

Laurel can set up a Doodle poll?? Who wants to take part? Maybe invite to meeting at NYBG?


  • Mailing lists

We need to define the function of each of the mailing lists: po, po-dev, po-announce, po-internal. I think po-announce, po-internal are fine, but what are the other 2 supposed to be for?

In mid-August the new list po-discuss@plantontology was set up and the members of po-internal were added to it. This is the address that will be used in the letters to the reviewers.

We all agreed that these need to be reviewed and we need to deal with the spam problem as well. May be able to use images instead of textual links to email addresses.

We will need to update the links to this lists on the PO web site (http://plantontology.org/mailarchs/mail_list.html)


  • New curator hired at NYBG: Angelica Cibrian has been hired and will be a split appointment between Genomics of Seed Plants project (3/4 time) and the PO (1/4). She will spend part of her time NYBG and rest at NYU. She has been working on using GO terms and annotations to analyze the Seed Plant data, and so can act as an interface between the Seed Plant project and the PO, perhaps provide annotations to the PO.

She started on Friday. Will she take place in POC conference calls? Should we add her to PO mailing lists (dev, internal, discuss)?

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