The results of a new survey of bioinformatics stakeholders' needs in the field of agronomic research are now available.

The objectives were:

• To identify potential needs that are not covered by the transPLANT project.
• To help define the landscape and possible overlaps with other projects.
• To better coordinate development in the field and to avoid redundancies.

The survey (now closed) was made accessible via the transPLANT web site here.

It was addressed to both scientists from academic and private sectors, working on wheat, barley, maize, pea, sunflower, rapeseed…, genomics and genetics. More than 200 people were reached personally by email. This survey contains 41 questions covering topics about biological data types, databases, analysis tools and infrastructure needs.

A first survey analysis was done in autumn 2013 based on 74 respondents. The main results were:

• Of the 74 respondents, 80% have the problem of data integration. They have difficulties because of the scale of the data (56,3%): algorithms and tools are not well adapted. They have limited information about strengths and weaknesses of available software (46,9%).
• However, they agree to share with others their elaborated (compute and expert) data concerning genomic sequencing (55%), resequencing (52,5%), genotyping (50%), and RNA-Seq derived expression data (52,5%).
• Respondents have problems in analysing their data because of species complexity (43,8 %), rapid technological change (40,6%), and because of problems hiring skilled staff.
• To solve these problems, respondents would like to have more user training sessions (85,7%), to have a unique web portal (71,4%) that is easy to query with guidelines to access tools and data resources. They would like to have a forum (45,7%) to exchange with people and to receive newsletters (28,6%) to be able to get summary information. Their preferred way to be informed is on their own (55%), by mailing (51%) and by newsletter (41%).

For reference a PDF of the survey questions is available below, along with the survey complete report (text, with graphics).