Biology is relying more and more on computers. Plant biology is changing with the rise of new technologies. With the advent of
bioinformatics,
computational biology,
DNA sequencing,
geographic information systems and others computers can greatly assist researchers who study plant life looking for solutions to challenges in
medicine,
biofuels,
biodiversity,
agriculture and problems like
drought tolerance,
plant breeding, and
sustainable farming. In 2006, the NSF solicited proposals to create "a new type of organization – a cyberinfrastructure collaborative for plant science" with a program titled "Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative" (PSCIC) with Christopher Greer as program director. A proposal was accepted (adopting the convention of using the word "Collaborative" as a noun) and iPlant was officially created on February 1, 2008.
Richard Jorgensen led the team through the proposal stage and was the
principal investigator (PI) from 2008 to 2009. As of May 2014, Co-PI Stanzione was replaced by 4 new Co-PIs: Doreen Ware at Cold Spring Harbor, Nirav Merchant and Eric Lyons at the University of Arizona, and Matthew Vaughn at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The iPlant project supports what has been called
e-Science, which is a use of information systems technology that is being adopted by the research community in efforts such as the
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), ELIXIR, and the Bamboo Technology Project that started in September 2010. iPlant is "designed to create the foundation to support the computational needs of the research community and facilitate progress toward solutions of major problems in plant biology." The project works as a
collaboration. It seeks input from the wider plant science community on what to build. Based on that input, it has enabled easier use of large data sets, created a community-driven research environment to share existing data collections within a research area and between research areas and shares data with
provenance tracking. One model studied for collaboration was
Wikipedia. Several more recent National Science Foundation awards mentioned iPlant explicitly in their descriptions, as either a design pattern to follow or a collaborator with whom the recipient will work.
Institutions The primary institution for the iPlant project is the
University of Arizona, located within the BIO5 Institute in
Tucson. Since its inception in 2008, personnel worked at other institutions including
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and the
University of Texas at Austin in the
Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Purdue University and
Arizona State University were part of the original project group. A visualization workshop employing iPlant was run by
Virginia Tech in 2011. The NSF requires that funding subcontracts stay within the United States, but international collaboration started in 2009 with the
Technical University of Munich East Main Evaluation & Consulting provides external oversight, advice, and assistance. == Services ==