The DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase): Progress Toward a System for Inference and Modeling of Biological Function in Plants

http://kbase.us

The Department of Energy 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 this data into a varied set of powerful computational tools that can analyze and simulate data to predict biological behavior, generate and test hypotheses, design new biological functions, and propose new experiments. The overarching objective is to provide a solid 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 demo will review the current status of the project, and describe the public plant data sets and analysis tools available at KBase. We show how a metabolic model can be reconstructed from the annotation of a plant genome and the Flux Balance Analysis tools that are available to explore the model in the context of plant growth.