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

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 data bases 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