Plant & Animal Genomes XIX Conference

January 15-19, 2011
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Recent Advances At The Plant Ontology: Tools For Linking Plant Anatomy And Development To Genomics Across Plant Taxa

Laurel D Cooper¹ , Ramona Walls² , Justin Elser¹ , Justin Preece¹ , Barry Smith³ , Chris Mungall⁴ , Maria A. Gandolfo⁵ , Dennis Wm. Stevenson² , Pankaj Jaiswal¹

¹  Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR

²  The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY

³  Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, NY

⁴  Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA;

⁵  Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

The Plant Ontology (PO: http://www.plantontology.org) is a structured vocabulary and database resource for all plant scientists that links plant anatomy, morphology and development to the rapidly expanding field of plant genomics. The PO consists of a hierarchical tree of rigorously-defined, interrelated terms that describe plant structures as well as plant growth and developmental stages. Originally designed to span the monocot-dicot divide in flowering plants (based on the model angiosperms; maize, rice and Arabidopsis), the PO has been redesigned to encompass a wide variety of other angiosperm species and to include terms and annotations from non-flowering plants: gymnosperms, pteridophytes (ferns and lycopods) and bryophytes (mosses). Links through the terms to associated annotations; structure or growth stage specific genes, proteins and phenotypes from numerous genomics datasets are an essential, powerful feature of the PO. Currently, the PO includes over 500,000 annotations associated with over 1,100 terms. The primary purpose of the PO is to facilitate cross-database querying and to foster consistent use of vocabularies in annotation. To this end, the PO is working to develop annotation tools for the plant science community. Outreach activities include workshops, conference presentations and outreach booths. In addition, image libraries are being created and linked to PO terms to provide reference images for plant structures along with their definitions. The PO is a valuable resource for both research and teaching that links genomic data to plant structures and growth and developmental stages of plants across many taxa.