The iPlant collaborative: cyberinfrastructure for plant biology

• ¹ BIO5 Institute, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
• ² Texas Advanced Computer Center, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA
• ³ Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC, USA
• ⁴ Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC, USA
• ⁵ Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
• ⁶ DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
• ⁷ Yale Peabody Museum, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
• ⁸ Department of Plant Pathology, Physiology and Weed Science, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
• ⁹ Ontario Center for Cancer Research, Toronto, ON, Canada
• ¹⁰ Center for Bio-image Informatics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
• ¹¹ Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
• ¹² Scientific Computing Group, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Heidelberg, Germany
• ¹³ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
• ¹⁴ Department of Agronomy, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA
• ¹⁵ National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), Durham, NC, USA
• ¹⁶ Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
• ¹⁷ Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
• ¹⁸ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
• ¹⁹ Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
• ²⁰ Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
• ²¹ Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
• ²² Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA, USA
• ²³ Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center, United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, Maricopa, AZ, USA
• ²⁴ Department of Plant Biology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
• ²⁵ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
• ²⁶ Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
• ²⁷ Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
• ²⁸ Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
• ²⁹ Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
• ³⁰ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
• ³¹ Eller School of Business, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
• ³² Department of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity’s projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services.