Plant Ontology (PO)The main objective of the Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is to develop, curate and share controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe plant structures and growth and developmental stages, providing a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across databases. The Plant Ontology (PO) has been developed and maintained with the primary goal to facilitate and accommodate functional annotation efforts in plant databases and by the plant research community at large. As a part of the POC project, participating databases such as TAIR, NASC, Gramene and MaizeGDB have been using PO to describe expression patterns of genes and phenotypes of mutants and natural variants. The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Plant ontology is not an extensive collection of botanical terms, but rather a complex hierarchical structure in which botanical concepts are described by their meaning and by relationship to each other. The main purpose of these vocabularies is to facilitate cross database querying and to foster consistent use of these vocabularies in the annotation of tissue and/or growth stage specific expression of genes, proteins and phenotypes. Educational aspect of the plant ontology is to some extent limited; this is imposed by the structure of the ontology itself and the limitations of the current software.
Participants and ContributorsThe Plant Ontology Consortium core members are Oregon State University and the Gramene database, The New York Botanical Garden and Cornell University. Some of the POC Collaborators and Contributors are: The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies project (OBO Foundry), the Gene Ontology Consortium (GO), the Generation Challenge Programme, SoyBase, the Solanaceae Genomics Network, the Arabidopsis Information Resource TAIR, MaizeGDB, the University of Missouri at St. Louis, the Missouri Botanical Garden at St. Louis MO, the International Rice Informations System (IRIS) and Oryzabase. |
What's New...!The Plant Ontology is on FaceBook! Come visit the Plant Ontology on FaceBook . Follow the latest updates and news.
Upcoming PresentationsThe Plant Ontology at PAG 2011 The PO will host a Collaborators Workshop on Sunday Jan.16th. Visit: Workshop Registration
Also, come and see us in the: Plant Phenotypes Workshop and at the Computer Demonstration and visit our Poster. Release notesFind the most recent
information on the database and website changes by visiting the release notes page.
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Acknowledgements
We kindly acknowledge the Gene Ontology Consortium, all the projects using the PO in their applications and all the reviewers for their valuable feedback and intellectual inputs.
- This project is currently funded (2009-2013) by the NSF (Award #0822201). It was previosuly supported by NSF Award #0321685, NSF Award #0321666, USDA CREES grant #00-52100-9622 and USDA ARS Specific Cooperative Agreement grant #58-1907-0-041 to the Gramene database, NSF Award #9978564 to TAIR.