Plant Science in KBase

The Department of Energy (DOE) Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) is a new community resource for predictive biology. It integrates a wide spectrum of data types across the microbial, microbial community, and plant domains and ties these data with a varied set of powerful analysis and simulation tools for predicting biological behavior, generating and testing hypotheses, designing new biological functions, and proposing new experiments. The overarching objective is to provide a solid computational platform that supports predictive biology in a framework that does not require users to learn separate systems to formulate and answer questions spanning a variety of topics in systems biology research.

This presentation will review the status of KBase, describe some of the currently available data sets and services in KBase, and provide demonstrations of how to use KBase tools to answer various biological and research questions. The workshop will include examples of how plant genome sequences provided by the DOE Joint Genome Institute can be used to build flux balance analysis metabolic models and contribute to association genetics workflows. These presentations are geared towards the community of plant researchers and computational biology developers.