Backgrounder: A Collaborative Endeavor
The iPlant Collaborative will bring together researchers in every plant biology discipline—from those working at the microscopic level, such as molecular biologists, cellular biologists and geneticists, to those working on the ecosystem and planetary level—in partnership with computer scientists and engineers, information scientists, mathematicians and social scientists, in order to facilitate communication and collaboration across all of these disciplines and provide tools so that these specialists can work together more effectively than they have in the past.
Collaboration is central to iPlant because it’s central to how science now done; scientists can no longer work in isolation from one another. Every discipline relies on the disciplines around it, and the boundaries between disciplines are no longer sharply defined. A geneticist might need to work closely with an ecologist, for instance, to understand the underlying causes of changes in a species’ genetic code and their consequences for the species’ adaptation to the environment. A team of plant biologists gathering data about a species’ genome and the environmental changes that affect that species might need to work closely with computer and information scientists to organize, analyze and interpret those data.
Acknowledgements: The iPlant Collaborative is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation Plant Cyberinfrastructure Program(#EF-0735191).
