Planteome: Reference Ontologies and a Platform for Integrative Plant Genomics

The Planteome project is a centralized online plant informatics portal which provides semantic integration of widely diverse datasets with the goal of plant improvement. Traditional plant breeding methods for crop improvement may be combined with next-generation analysis methods and automated scoring of traits and phenotypes to develop improved varieties. The Planteome project (www.planteome.org) develops and hosts a suite of reference ontologies for plants associated with a growing corpus of genomics data. Data annotations linking phenotypes and germplasm to genomics resources are achieved by data transformation and mapping species-specific controlled vocabularies to the reference ontologies. Analysis and annotation tools are being developed to facilitate studies of plant traits, phenotypes, diseases, gene function and expression and genetic diversity data across a wide range of plant species. The project database and the online resources provide researchers tools to search and browse and access remotely via APIs for semantic integration in annotation tools and data repositories providing resources for plant biology, breeding, genomics and genetics.