Data Integration for the Plant Research Community: The Arabidopsis Information Portal

The Arabidopsis Information Portal (AIP; http://www.araport.org) is a new on-line resource for plant biology research. AIP was funded by NSF and BBSRC starting in 2013 to provide users with a single interface through which to access a wide range of Arabidopsis information - a “one-stop shop” - using state-of-the-art web technologies. As part of this mandate, AIP inherited from TAIR the responsibility of providing free access to up-to-date structural and functional annotation for the Col-0 genome. AIP currently hosts the TAIR 10 Col-0 annotation and integrates it with data from UniProt, PubMed, BAR, EPIC-CoGe, IntAct, ATTED II and other sources. Gene structure updates, including splice variants that make use of tissue-specific transcript assemblies of RNA seq data will be incorporated into the next genome annotation release. An interface to allow community curation of gene structure and function is under development. AIP users can query and view the data with powerful GMOD software including InterMine, JBrowse and GBrowse. Users can not only save results but manipulate them, visualize them, and expose them as web services. Users can post information about positions and conferences, read news, link out to stock centers, leverage iPlant resources, and interact with other users. Designed for sustainability, the AIP strategy exploits existing scientific computing infrastructure, adopts a practical mix of data integration technologies, and encourages its user community to contribute suggestions, data sets, web services, and software.