VirtualPlant: A Software Platform for Translational Systems Biology Research

To enable Systems Biology studies across plant species, we have developed the VirtualPlant software platform. VirtualPlant (www.virtualplant.org) includes tools for data analysis, integration and visualization such as the Arabidopsis MultiNetwork interaction database, and novel data visualization tools including BioMaps and Sungear [1,2]. VirtualPlant enables seamless integration of data and tools into a single software platform by virtue of its unique “Gene Cart”, which enables researchers to store results, enabling iterative cycles of analysis, a highlight of Systems Biology.  Additionally, VirtualPlant’s web-based user-friendly GUI enables plant biologists to analyze their own genomic data, enabling them to uncover and infer biological insights.

VirtualPlant has played an integral part in enabling Plant Systems Biology research in prominent plant labs around the world.  Our recent expansion of VirtualPlant to include important crop genomes, such as Rice and Maize, allows VirtualPlant to reach a much wider plant genomics community. By facilitating comparisons of crop networks to Arabidopsis, VirtualPlant also supports translational research. For example, VirtualPlant allows researchers to predict how an interacting network of genes/products in crop genomes will react as a system in response to an environmental change or genetic modifications, and predict genes to target for manipulation.

This computer demonstration reveals how Virtual Plant Crop is a Plant Systems Biology resource that can be used to enable hypothesis generating translational research across plant genomes. We will use a case study to show how VirtualPlant can be used to build a hypothesis regarding N-responsive gene networks in Maize, by transferring “network knowledge” from Arabidopsis.