DEVELOPMENT OF AN ONTOLOGY TO AID SUGARCANE RESEARCH

WHILE scientific research for different plant species will often utilise speciesspecific terms to describe plant structure and developmental stages, it is important that researchers be able to share and compare ideas and data. The ability to unify plant terms and organise them in a systematic manner is crucial for more efficient research and discovery. To this end, the Plant Ontology was created as an initiative of the Plant Ontology Consortium. The Plant Ontology is a controlled vocabulary of terms used to attribute data (for example, a genotype or phenotype) to a specific plant structure or developmental stage. Plant Ontology enhances communication amongst researchers via consistent use of terminology. It facilitates and simplifies cross-species comparative studies; for example, comparison of genes involved in flowering among related or evolutionarily distant species. What’s more, Plant Ontology may enhance the exposure of research efforts by opening research results to an audience wider than researchers of a single crop. The Plant Ontology currently integrates existing ontologies for Arabidopsis, maize, rice and other cereal crops and can be viewed and queried at www.plantontology.org This discussion paper looks at some relevant existing ontologies and the benefits to the Australia sugarcane research community through the creation of a sugarcane ontology.