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A meeting was held with support from the UK Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council (with additional support from transPLANT) to bring together researchers from the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union to discuss the potential application of plant (trait, phenotype) ontologies to describe agronomic traits in crop plants.

Organisers:
Ruth Bastow, University of Warwick
Paul Kersey, European Bioinformatics Institute
Chris Rawlings, Rothamsted Research

DETAILS:
As an ever-increasing amount of sequence information for a variety of plant species becomes readily available, a gap is emerging between the physical genome information and the quantitative information regarding phenotypes and traits. It is becoming clear that the application of quantitative genetic information by researchers and breeders is limited by a lack of standardisation in the nomenclature used to describe both crop development and agronomic traits. Without either standardisation of nomenclature, or information which provides the equivalence links between trait descriptions, it is hard to compare information from QTL and association studies in a way that permits systematic transfer of knowledge about genotype-phenotype relationships among crops or between crops and their nearest model organism.

We are therefore invited a small number of scientists from the UK and US to assess current plant-focused ontologies, to explore how they can be used to link between phenotype to genotype relationships, to identify gaps in their coverage and to recommend areas for future collaboration in the development and extension of ontologies.