Cold Spring Harbor, New York
April 4, 2008
Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory will host the inaugural conference
of the iPlant Collaborative, an NSF-funded, $50 million project
to create a virtual center in cyberspace for plant sciences
researchers and students. The kickoff conference, titled
"Bringing Plant and Computing Scientists Together to Solve Plant
Biology's Grand Challenges" and scheduled for April 7-9, 2008,
will take the first steps in tackling some of plant biology's
greatest unsolved mysteries — its grand challenge questions.
Researchers from every plant biology discipline will join with
an equally diverse selection of computing researchers to
collaboratively set criteria for determining the most compelling
grand challenges facing plant biology today. They also will
discuss the hardware, software and computational tools needed to
create a cyberinfrastructure to solve those challenges.
After the conference, self-forming teams from around the country
and around the world will propose specific grand challenge
questions for the iPlant Collaborative to tackle. Proto-teams
will begin to form at the conference, but attendance is not
required to submit a proposal.
iPlant anticipates taking on two to four community-chosen grand
challenge questions by the end of its first year, and more in
future years. The cyberinfrastructure the collaborative builds
will be custom designed to meet the needs of the specific
questions selected. Categories of questions on which the iPlant
community might choose to focus include, but are not limited to,
questions about how plants grow from single cells into complex,
multicellular organisms; how and to what extent plants can adapt
to environmental changes; how plants have evolved in the past
and their potential to evolve in the future; and how plants live
together with other organisms in ecosystems.
Solving grand challenges is crucial, says University of Arizona
plant sciences professor and iPlant director Richard Jorgensen,
Ph.D., because plants affect every aspect of our lives.
“Everything’s connected,” he explains. “As our climate and
environment change we need to have a deep understanding of the
biology of plants from the molecular to the ecosystem level in
order to understand and mitigate the problems that will arise —
to adapt as best we can and to focus our efforts on saving the
organisms and ecosystems that are most important to save.”
"Biology has become an information science," says Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory researcher Lincoln Stein, Ph.D., a
co-principal investigator on the project. "However, many in the
plant research community lack the computational skills and tools
[needed] to take full advantage of the wealth of information
that is out there. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure seeks to level
the playing field by making sophisticated databases, modeling
tools and visualization systems available to everyone."
The conference will be webcast live to allow researchers to
participate actively in the conference from anywhere in the
country or the world. Up to three simultaneous live feeds are
anticipated to be webcast from the Laboratory, with moderators
on hand to field questions and discussion from remote attendees.
The conference will also address iPlant's commitment to reaching
out to K-12, undergraduate and graduate students at a session on
training the next generation of scientists in computational
thinking. Ultimately, students, teachers and the public will all
have access to iPlant’s resources and data, as well as to
educational tools designed to help them understand that data and
develop inquiry-based learning modules. “iPlant offers an
unprecedented opportunity to involve teachers and students in
leading-edge biology,” explains iPlant investigator Vicki
Chandler, Ph.D., director of the University of Arizona’s BIO5
Institute.
“With plant genome sequences freely available online, this is
the first time in the history of biology that students can
potentially work with the same information, at the same time,
and with the same tools as research scientists. We want to help
teachers move their students into this real-time collaboration
with plant scientists, noted David Micklos, Executive Director
of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Dolan DNA Learning Center.
Institutions working together on the iPlant Collaborative
include the University of Arizona, Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory, Arizona State University, the University of North
Carolina at Wilmington and Purdue University. The project’s
board of directors will be chaired by Robert Last, Ph.D., of
Michigan State University.
To register for the conference or for more information, visit
http://meetings.cshl.edu/meetings/iPlant08.shtml
To sign up for the free webcast, visit
http://www.iplantcollaborative.org/meetings/ipc/webcast-042008
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
is a private, nonprofit research and education institution
dedicated to exploring molecular biology and genetics in order
to advance the understanding and ability to diagnose and treat
cancers, neurological diseases and other causes of human
suffering. |
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