Vision: The Grand Challenges of Plant Biology

"Grand Challenges" are questions that a scientific community recognizes as far-reaching in scope and central in importance. Through a series of workshops, participants from diverse disciplines of plant research and computational science met to identify Grand Challenge questions, as well as the necessary tools and approaches needed to make progress toward answering them.

Grand Challenge Teams — cross-disciplinary, community-driven research groups — work collaboratively with iPlant to develop a cyberinfrastructure foundation that supports the computational needs of the research community and facilitates progress toward solving major problems in plant science. The cyberinfrastructure supports a diverse group of plant science researchers and brings together experts from various fields of biology, as well as computer science.

The iPlant platform helps researchers use tools and data more easily and efficiently.  It provides sustainable access to high performance computing, interoperable software analysis, and large data sets. The cyberinfrastructure is accessible for all levels of expertise, ranging from students to traditional biology researchers and computational biology experts.