Last Monday the Arabidopsis community gathered for the Arabidopsis Information Portal workshop at PAG XXIII. The Arabidopsis Informatics Portal (AIP) was funded by NSF and BBSRC to move beyond the Arabidopsis genome resource provided by TAIR toward linking the genome to the epigenome, proteome, transcriptome and interactome.
The first talk was a short update from Eva Huala, formerly of TAIR and now of Phoenix Bioinformatics, the nonprofit company she started in order to keep TAIR going. Huala explained that after TAIR’s NSF funding ended, the pay-to-access model was chosen over the alternative pay-to-submit (open access) approach. This means TAIR is focussed on ensuring the subscribers get the best possible value for money by providing the best possible database curation, manual annotation and user experience. Most TAIR subscription fees are paid by libraries, as if it was a journal, but researchers from institutions whose libraries do not pay the fee will be able to access TAIR’s manual annotation after a year’s embargo.
Next, Sean May (NASC, University of Nottingham) explained that NASC is a module of AIP and is currently integrating with the ABRC. He is consulting the community about the development of NASC, so make sure you have your say in the NASC Strategy Survey:
Chia-yi Cheng (JCVI) gave an overview of Araport, the online home of the AIP. Araport federates diverse datasets from other places, for example TAIR, UniProt and BAR, and maintains the Col-0 ‘gold standard’ annotation. It uses JBrowse as the default genome browser and hosts datasets including the CoGe epigenomics resource, which I blogged about last week. (more…)
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