Cold Spring Harbor, New York
January 30, 2008
Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) will play a central role in
an important new initiative called the iPlant Collaborative,
funded by the National Science
Foundation (NSF). The Collaborative will define and address
“grand challenge questions” in plant biology that have global
implications.
“The idea is to develop an all-encompassing computer- and
internet-based infrastructure that will transform the way plant
science is done, and that will be accessible, at different
levels, by scientists across the disciplines and across the
planet,” explained Lincoln Stein, Ph.D., CSHL professor and a
co-principal investigator of the Collaborative. “In addition,
the program will be a valuable resource for students and
interested members of the public.”
CSHL and four research universities, led by the University of
Arizona, will share a $50 million NSF grant over five years to
launch the iPlant Collaborative. It will bring together
researchers from every area within plant biology – molecular and
cellular biologists, geneticists, genome scientists, as well as
experts on ecosystems and biosystem diversity – by building
infrastructure through which they can more readily interact and
collaborate.
Since research is done in real-time as well as “offline” in
conjunction with mathematicians, computer scientists and
engineers, informatics experts, and even social scientists,
plant biologists can be certain that the tools available through
the iPlant network will reflect the latest knowledge. “This
reflects the way science is done in the 21st century,” says Rob
Martienssen, Ph.D., professor and head of plant genetics at
CSHL. “The days have long passed when it made sense for
individual scientists, or individual labs, or even individual
institutions, to attack major scientific questions in isolation
from the broader community.”
Collaboration across disciplines in pursuit of innovative
science – for instance, plant genome experts working
side-by-side with mathematicians and statisticians to interpret
the results of innovative microarray scans of genomic mutations
designed by biosystems engineers – is already the norm in the
plant science community and throughout the life sciences.
“But,” emphasizes Dr. Stein, whose bioinformatics tools are
widely used by genome scientists worldwide, “the dimension that
is lacking, and which the Collaborative seeks to address,
concerns the forging of a functional community, within the
discipline and extending to those in computer science, math and
other fields, upon whose expertise plant science depends.”
CSHL, through its Dolan DNA Learning Center (DNALC), will
collaborate with the project team to embed outreach materials
within the iPlant portal, thus tightly linking plant research
and education. Such material will include video and audio
podcasts to publicize the project and to provide students and
teachers a window on the “grand challenge” development process.
The DNALC will work with plant researchers to develop video
interviews and narrated animations that explain the conceptual
background and historical development of each “grand challenge.”
The culmination of which will spawn a nationwide program that
will train 1,000 science teachers in how to utilize iPlant tools
for student projects that support integrative and computational
thinking.
“Science education and public outreach typically begin well
after a scientific revolution has settled down into what Thomas
Kuhn called normal science. In this project, we want to directly
involve students and teachers in this revolutionary period of
plant research by providing them with educational interfaces
into the same data used by iPlant scientists,” stated David
Micklos, Ph.D., Executive Director of the DNALC.
The iPlant Collaborative was formed after a call for proposals
in 2006 from the NSF’s Department of Biological Infrastructure.
CSHL will host the Collaborative’s inaugural meeting, set for
April 2008, as well as additional meetings throughout the
five-year period of the NSF grant.
“It’s an exciting prospect that brings to mind some other
forward-looking moments in the recent history of biological
research in which CSHL was deeply involved,” said Dr.
Martienssen. “It was on our campus that the idea for sequencing
the first plant genome got off the ground, and where the
outlines of what became the Human Genome Project were first
sketched. We are hoping that the iPlant Collaborative will also
achieve great things.”
CSHL is a private, non-profit 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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