In what was likely her last lecture as a University of Arizona researcher, Vicki Chandler, outgoing director of the BIO5 Institute, explained the effort to collaborate across scientific disciplines in order to answer questions about her area of expertise, plant sciences.
Last year, the iPlant Collaborative received a $50 million grant from the National Science Foundation to bring together plant, computer and information scientists to create a knowledge-sharing database. Although based at the UA, other institutions, including Arizona State University, the University of North Carolina and Purdue University are also involved in the project.
 Outgoing Bio5 director Vicki Chandler explains the new iPlant Collaborative database progress.Kadie Pangburn photo |
In December, Chandler announced she would be moving to San Francisco to be the new chief science program officer at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. In addition to leading BIO5, Chandler taught classes in genetics and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The iPlant Collaborative will address the issue of bringing together all the data on plant sciences and making it both readily accessible and easy to understand.
On the plus side, anything on the Internet can be accessed anywhere else around the world. The downside is, not all of the databases are capable of handling large amounts of requests and many require an understanding of computer systems to access the data in the first place, she said.
The result is a Tower of Babel-type problem. There is so much data already available, but it is not being fully utilized because it’s so fragmented.
“This is not a problem limited to plant biology, but in plant biology alone there are hundreds of databases,” Chandler said.
To get a sense of how much plant data there is out there, consider that in the area of gene research alone, it has been six years since the human genome was mapped completely. That effort took 10 years, $2.7 billion and contains 3 billion characters. Today, thousands of human genomes can be mapped in process that now takes one month and $100,000. Taking into account that there are thousands of species of plants in the world, many of them with more complex DNA, and considering that plant research produces more data than just the listing of DNA strands, it’s easy to see how daunting bringing the information together is.
“Biologists are simply awash in data,” Chandler said. “All of this data is being collected and not being integrated.”
The iPlant team consists of 24 scientists from five institutions, with the UA contributing 15 researchers from four separate colleges.
The other side of the collaboration deals with the more practical aspect of the project.
Plant science goes beyond cataloging the many different species. A greater understanding of how and why plants function can lead to a better understanding of climate and food issues.
Several local companies conduct research in agriculture and nutrition areas. These include RediRipe, which developed a sticker that changes color based on when fruit is ready to eat, and S.A.F.E. R&D, the makers of a nutritional supplement for bees.
Although disciplines like astronomy and physics also produce mass amounts of data, Chandler believes that the area of plant research received the grant because it has the potential to solve major problems.
“If those mass amounts are brought together, we can address the grand challenge questions,” Chandler said.
Some of those grand challenge questions could include how climate change affects plant ecosystems, how to feed the projected 9 billion people in 2050, and how to use computer models to predict how plants work and interact.
Chandler also hinted at a place for citizen scientists to help with the project. Parts of that effort could resemble the data-crunching project on the mass scale was SETI@home. Launched in 1999, the project allows users to crunch the mass amounts of data while their computers were sitting idle in order to look for evidence of intelligent, extraterrestrial life.
The next lecture in the “Science that Transforms” series will feature Tufts University philosophy professor Daniel Dennett speaking on Darwin’s reasoning behind his natural selection theory and how that can be understood in today’s world. The talk will start at 7 p.m. Tuesday (Feb. 17) in Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd. on the UA campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Contact reporter Nicholas Smith at nsmith@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4238.
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