W412 Responding to the Community- The International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium and developing the Arabidopsis Informatics Portal

Date: Monday, January 16, 2012
Time: 12:50 PM
Room: Pacific Salon 6-7 (2nd Floor)
Blake C. Meyers , University Delaware, Newark, DE
The IAIC was initiated following two community-organized workshops held in 2010 to address increasing bioinformatics needs for Arabidopsis data and in response to funding concerns for the community’s primary database, TAIR. The goal of this community-led international initiative is to manage the increasing amounts and types of data and to leverage growing resources, knowledge, and collaborations. The IAIC will consist of a distributed system of data, tools and resources that would be funded by a variety of sources under an international management and scientific advisory board. It will be dynamic and represent the evolving needs and capacities of the community while reflecting the funding interests of the respective countries. The core of the IAIC initially will consist of four parts: 1) the Arabidopsis Information Portal (AIP); 2) the “gold-standard” genome annotation; 3) genome/sequence curation of data on gene functions; and 4) stocks and resources databases. The AIP is the underlying infrastructure of the IAIC and will interact with and link to resources across the globe. Once the AIP is established and accessible by the community, additional modules can be linked in, allowing data integration. A major event in the development of the core AIP was the ‘Design Workshop’ held in December, 2011 which started the discussions necessary to secure critical AIP funding sources. The workshop at PAG will outline the key outcomes of the Design Workshop and what the next steps are for AIP development. Further, it is recognized that cohesive, cooperative, and long-term international collaboration will be critical to successfully maintain an Arabidopsis database infrastructure that is essential for plant biology research worldwide. Therefore, the workshop will also include information on international partnerships and potential funding sources.