Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to play central role addressing key questions in pla...( Cold Spring Harbor NY Cold Spring Ha...)

Cold Spring Harbor, NY Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) will play a central role in an important new initiative called the iPlant Collaborative, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Collaborative will define and address grand challenge questions in plant biology that have global implications.

The idea is to develop an all-encompassing computer- and internet-based infrastructure that will transform the way plant science is done, and that will be accessible, at different levels, by scientists across the disciplines and across the planet, explained Lincoln Stein, Ph.D., CSHL professor and a co-principal investigator of the Collaborative. In addition, the program will be a valuable resource for students and interested members of the public.

CSHL and four research universities, led by the University of Arizona, will share a $50 million NSF grant over five years to launch the iPlant Collaborative. It will bring together researchers from every area within plant biology molecular and cellular biologists, geneticists, genome scientists, as well as experts on ecosystems and biosystem diversity by building infrastructure through which they can more readily interact and collaborate.

Since research is done in real-time as well as offline in conjunction with mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers, informatics experts, and even social scientists, plant biologists can be certain that the tools available through the iPlant network will reflect the latest knowledge. This reflects the way science is done in the 21st century, says Rob Martienssen, Ph.D., professor and head of plant genetics at CSHL. The days have long passed when it made sense for individual scientists, or individual labs, or even individual institutions, to attack major scientific questions in isolation from the broader community.

Collaboration across disciplines in pursuit of innovative science for instance, plant genome experts working sid
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