Recent Developments at COGE and EPIC

Inexpensive sequencing technology permits the characterization of genome-wide epigenetic modifications.  Some challenges facing epigenentic researchers are integrating their data so it may be dynamically viewed on genomic information, shared with collaborators, merged with publicly available datasets, and overlayed on comparative genomic analyses.  To address these needs, the Epigenomics of Plants International Consortium (EPIC: https://www.plant-epigenome.org) is collaborating with the development team of the comparative genomics platform, CoGe (http://genomevolution.org).  This collaboration, supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, is leveraging the combined expertises of these groups along with the cyberinfrastructure of the iPlant Collaborative (http://iplantcollaborative.org).  Together, this team of researchers and developers are building extensions to CoGe that will:

• Implement a high-performance and portable data engine that can store thousands of plant epigenetic experimental datasets
• Enable researchers to load their own experiments, keep them private, and share them will collaborators
• Develop a web-based visualization system for overlaying and partitioning epigenetics data onto genomic annotations
• Enable researchers to select and organize sets of epigenetics experiments for dynamic visualization
• Load all publicly available epigenetics datasets for Arabidopsis

This talk with review progress that has been made towards these aims and provide an overview of features that are now available to the epigenetics research community.  Thus far, significant progress has been made towards all of these goals and are available for public use.  Feedback and comments from the epigenetics community are welcomed and appreciated.