### Report of the NSF Workshop for a Plant Cyberinfrastructure Center

October 17-18, 2005

Edited by: Elliot Meyerowitz and Seung Y. Rhee

### 

**Introduction**

Recent progress in plant science has resulted in the development of a
wide range of new tools and resources for research and education. These
include genome scale information (such as whole genome sequences and
annotations, and high resolution genetic and physical maps), extensive
phenotypic data sets (derived from gene expression profiling,
proteomics, and metabolic data sets) genetic resources (such as
sequence-catalogued collections of mutants, recombinant inbred lines,
and transgenic collections), functional genomics assets (including
reporter-gene expression collections, high-throughput deletion and RNAi
sets, protein interaction surveys, and high-throughput protein structure
resources) and informatics resources (software tools, algorithms,
databases, and web sites). While each of these resources is quite useful
individually, their highest value generally lies in their use in
combination, and by researchers outside the groups that created the
resources.

Optimal use of all of these resources, then, requires combining the
information represented among them in innovative ways to achieve a
better understanding of fundamental principles in plant biology; and it
also requires that individuals from multiple fields and disciplines be
able to find, understand and effectively employ these resources in novel
ways. Such innovative, synthetic approaches do not yet come
'off-the-shelf' and, instead, present a significant new challenge that
can only be met by plant researchers/educators, information scientists,
and others working together.

To discuss the means by which to achieve such a synthesis of resources,
and to design the appropriate cyberinfrastructure for their best
utilization, a workshop on Plant Cyberinfrastructure was held at the
National Science Foundation on October 17 and 18, 2005. The participants
represented the widest possible range of plant and computational
biologists, with experts in plant genomics, development, metabolism,
ecology, and evolutionary biology, ecoinformatics and experts in
computational modeling, databases, computer infrastructure, software,
and mathematics.

**List of Participants:**

+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| # Name       | # Institution        | # Department                   |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
|              |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Dan Ashlock  | Iowa State           | Mathematics                    |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Reed Beaman  | Yale                 | Research & Collection          |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Volker       | Iowa State           | Bioinformatics                 |
| Brendel      |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Ed Buckler   | Cornell University   | Life Science/Genomics          |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Clint        | Purdue University    | Biochemistry                   |
| Chapple      |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Gloria       | NY University        | Biology                        |
| Coruzzi      |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Cliff        | Duke                 | Biology                        |
| Cunningham   |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Julie        | Iowa State           | Department of Electrical and   |
| Dickerson    |                      | Computer Engineering           |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Peggy Lemaux | UC Berkeley          | Cooperative Extension          |
|              |                      | Specialist in Plant            |
|              |                      | Biotechnology                  |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Sean May     | Univ. of Nottingham  | Plant Science                  |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Pedro Mendez | Virginia Tech        | Plant Pathology, Physiology,   |
|              |                      | and Weed Science Department    |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Elliot       | Caltech              | Biology                        |
| Meyerowitz   |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Mark Miller  | Carnegie Mellon Un.  | Robotics Institute             |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Brent        | UC Berkeley          | Integrative Biology Department |
| Mishler      |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Eric         | UC Irvine            | ISC-Info & Computer Science    |
| Mjolsness    |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Magnus       | USC                  | Molecular & Computational      |
| Nordborg     |                      | Biology                        |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| James        | UC Santa Barbara     | National Center for Ecological |
| Reichman     |                      | Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Seung Y.     | Carnegie Institution | Plant Biology                  |
| Rhee         |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Johanna      | Brown University     | Ecology and Evolutionary       |
| Schmitt      |                      | Biology                        |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Heiko Schoof | Max-Planck Inst.     | Plant Computational Biology    |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Kimmen       | UC Berkeley          | Bioengineering                 |
| Sjolander    |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Lincoln      | Cold Spring Harbor   | Bioinformatics                 |
| Stein        |                      |                                |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Mike Sussman | U of Wisc.-Madison   | Biotechnology Center           |
|              |                      | Biochemistry                   |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Fedora       | S. Dakota State      | Plant Science and              |
| Sutton       |                      | Biology/Microbiology           |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Todd Vision  | U of N. Carolina     | Biology                        |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+
| Cathy Wu     | Georgetown           | Biochemistry & Molecular       |
|              |                      | Biology                        |
+--------------+----------------------+--------------------------------+

The participants, despite their wide variety of specialties and
interests, achieved consensus on a number of issues, among them the need
for a plant science center to provide the cyberinfrastructure for future
work in plant science and for the developing new field of plant
computational modeling, a vision for the mission and goals of such a
center, and some suggestions for practices that might be followed to
assure that such a center plays a central role in establishing software
and interface standards and in outreach.

**Goals for a Plant Cyberinfrastructure Center**

The goals of a plant cyberinfrastructure center should be fourfold:

-   To enable new research approaches to fundamental questions in plant
    biology, which are not currently possible in individual
    laboratories, by providing the cyberinfrastructure for synthesis and
    collaboration by interdisciplinary teams

-   To train a new generation of scientists to embrace
    multi-disciplinary approaches to develop a better understanding of
    plant systems

-   To interact with the broader biological science community to set
    standards for data and meta data description, software and
    computational interfaces, so that the data created by the community
    of plant scientists can be used broadly and simply, and so that it
    will remain useful for long after the specific researchers
    responsible for it have moved on to other subjects

-   To serve as an umbrella under which outreach programs in plant
    biology will be developed, coordinated and disseminated

**Goal 1: New research approaches**

Many possible models for a center exist, and many were discussed. The
workshop participants achieved a strong consensus that a center should
foster an environment to address large biological problems, rather than
focusing on development of methods or materials for the plant science
community (though these may result from a problem-focused approach). The
scientific goal of the center, then, would be the solution of a critical
set of biological problems that require new interdisciplinary
applications of biological, engineering, mathematical, computational and
possibly other expertise. By doing this, the center would not only
advance plant science, but would also serve as a focal point for
integration of data and ideas from other laboratories interested in some
aspect of the same large problems.

Rather than focusing on a single biological question or approach, a
center should enable collaborative research into a range of questions
that could span molecular, cellular, organismal, ecological, and
evolutionary levels.

As examples of the scale of problem that a center might approach, a set
of problem areas discussed in the workshop included the following list.
It is only a sample of possible questions that a center could address
and which were brought up at the workshop. It is not meant to be an
exclusive list of scientific directions on which a center should focus:

-   Regulation of temporal and spatial patterns of gene expression,
    protein abundance and metabolite accumulation in plants

-   Regulation of plant growth and development, cell-cell communication
    and responses of all relevant systems to the environment, with the
    ultimate goal of modeling how a plant responds to intrinsic and
    extrinsic cues

-   Elucidation of essential mechanisms that underpin how plants evolve
    and adapt to diverse environments such as the transition from
    aquatic to land environments

-   Integration of all mechanisms of inheritance in plants, for example
    at the Mendelian and epigenetic levels and their impact at the
    individual and populational levels

-   Identification and manipulation of the factors that limit
    agricultural productivity and quality

-   Understanding the social and biological factors involved in plant
    domestication

-   Understanding biotic and abiotic interactions in the rhizosphere

-   Understanding the mechanism and origin of cell types, tissues,
    organs, and organ systems

-   Understanding the functionality and evolution of plant genomes

The center should be designed and staffed so as to facilitate the
integration of existing data to enable investigators to answer important
questions. To do so it will need to serve the following functions:

-   Bring together people with diverse and complementary expertise to
    facilitate novel and effective collaborations

-   Provide a training environment for postdoctoral scholars that will
    create a new type of scientist who can deal with both quantitative
    and qualitative biological datasets

-   Facilitate the mining of published data for existing information
    that would be amenable to subsequent database deposition

-   Facilitate the creation and maintenance of common representation
    schemas for cellular components and interactions

-   Enable the community to synthesize existing data to provide a
    framework for the identification of important gaps in our knowledge
    of plant biology that should be addressed in the future

A plant cyberinfrastructure center, then, should provide the
environment, infrastructure and research platform for researchers to
answer central questions in plant biology through the use of community
resources such as plant genomes, databases, and through the development
of new computational approaches. For example, the environment of the
center should make it possible for plant scientists to analyze and
synthesize large data sets using computational methods developed and
executed in collaboration with the cooperation of mathematicians and
computer scientists.

**Physical or virtual center**: The issue of whether a virtual center
should be considered was discussed; the consensus is that physical
proximity of center members is necessary. A number of different
mechanisms to achieve this can be envisioned, however, with mechanisms
for a center ranging from geographically distributed to a cluster of
institutions that are nearby, to a single location. In cases where a
center spans large geographic distances, a key component of any center
plan would be an outline of how collaboration across these institutions
will be facilitated and true community would be established. One model
for this that was discussed was a hub and spoke model, wherein a single
physical center serves as the locus for the infrastructure and for
training, with a series of laboratories that have necessary experimental
equipment and expertise acting in a formal collaboration that allows
scientists from the center to pay long-term visits to the collaborating
laboratories, and requires scientists from the labs at the ends of the
spokes to visit and interact productively with the physical center at
the hub. There may be other viable models for the architecture of the
center. Regardless of the model, the group felt strongly that the center
should be able to operate beyond the boundary of a single institution
and that it should be as inclusive as possible in engaging the larger
research community.

**Goal 2: Education and Training**

The proposed center should provide a mechanism for the scientific
community to train a new generation of world-class scientists in plant
biology -- scientists who will be facile with mathematical and
engineering approaches, and also with cutting-edge methods and
intellectual questions in plant biology, and who will therefore
represent a new type of scientist, trained from the start in what are
now several different disciplines, and capable of taking new types of
approaches to fundamental problems of plant science. A center could
serve as an important locus for postdoctoral training and for short or
extended visits from faculty at other institutions.

**Postdoctoral and faculty training**: Since some postdoctoral scholars
and visiting sabbatical faculty may come from diverse backgrounds (e.g.,
including those with PhDs outside plant biology or with exclusively
computational backgrounds), an ideal cyberinfrastructure center would
include the opportunity for specialized training in several core areas
including cutting-edge "wet" experimental technologies (e.g., tandem
mass spectrometry, DNA chip arrays, advanced optical methods, and so on)
and "dry" experimental technologies (e.g., bioinformatics methods for
data analysis and interpretation, including cluster analysis for the
results of expression data studies, homology detection, protein fold
prediction and phylogenetic tree construction; advanced image processing
and analysis, etc.). A center should provide both the fundamental
computational and wet-bench experimental infrastructure to enable
participants to investigate scientific questions effectively. It is not
necessary that the experimental technologies, resources and expertise be
available within the primary host institution (in fact, the workshop
participants expect that not all components will be available in any one
institution). This infrastructure might be distributed across the
several institutions associated with the center, as described above in
the "hub and spoke" example, with extended visits of center postdoctoral
fellows to the collaborating institutions for experimental work.

**Mentoring and advising of postdoctoral scholars**. Given that
postdoctoral scholars may not be assigned to individual faculty members
or principal investigators at the center, and may indeed work at the
center and at participating laboratories at different times, the
question of appropriate mentoring of postdoctoral scholars should be
addressed in the organization of the center. Senior investigators at the
host institution (or affiliated labs) who are willing to serve as
postdoctoral mentors/advisors should be identified. Alternatively,
postdoctoral researchers may be asked to form an advisory committee of
his/her choice, and mechanisms by which the postdoc will interact with
the committee as a group or individually could be described.

**Think-tank environment**: An ideal center will also provide a
think-tank environment in which center participants (postdoctoral
scholars, sabbatical visitors, investigators at the home institution and
invited scientists) can discuss big questions in plant biology and
brainstorm about solutions to these questions. The center should enable
participants to envision and possibly develop new technologies that
would catalyze advances in the field. A center should ideally provide an
environment that attracts world-class investigators in different fields
as visiting speakers or participants.

**Communication, inclusiveness and community building**: The workshop
participants envisioned the center as functioning as a hub, connecting
groups with specialized expertise. Therefore, effective communication
mechanisms across all groups associated with the center should be
outlined. A center should develop a true cyberinfrastructure that
enables all center participants to access and understand the research
and activities of the center community as a whole. Ideally, this
cyberinfrastructure will enable the greater scientific community to
access the results of the center activities (i.e., expanding the broader
impacts of the center).

**Achieving these disparate aims:** To accomplish these several aims,
one can envision a variety of mechanisms, listed here as examples.

-   A center could provide workshops in "best practices" in different
    technologies and methodologies (or encourage center participants to
    attend such workshops provided elsewhere).

-   The host institution could identify institutions or labs with the
    requisite experimental infrastructure and expertise to serve as the
    "spokes" of the wheel.

-   Postdoctoral scholars and sabbatical visitors could be encouraged to
    make visits (of weeks or months, or longer) to collaborating
    institutions.

-   A center may wish to include regular seminars in plant biology and
    technology, inviting leaders in the field from other institutions as
    external speakers.

-   Technical staff could be included in the Center to construct and
    maintain online resources (including database development or
    interactivity, if relevant) presenting the results of Center
    activities and research efforts.

**Goal 3: Software and Interface Standards**

Implicit in the scientific goals described above is a series of goals in
setting standards for data and metadata description and software and
computational interfaces, so that the data created by the community of
plant scientists, and the work done at the center, could be used broadly
and simply and remain useful for long after the specific researchers
responsible for it have moved on to other subjects.

To do this, the center should use and encourage the adoption of
understandable, published data interchange standards whenever practical.
These standards should not apply only to static data objects but to data
processing techniques such as pipelines. Where possible, data, metadata,
and data processing protocols should be readable by users and machines.

Active support of these standards in the form of consulting experts
associated with the center who are conversant in existing standards, and
who take a leadership role in convening standards working groups, should
be a part of the center's mission. Reference implementations and
standards compliance testing suites should be a part of the center's
implementation efforts.

An imposed standard creates friction. A consensus standard is
intrinsically outdated. A middle road between imposition and community
consensus is thus desirable. The center should proactively support the
creation or adoption of draft standards, where practical, which are
sufficiently extensible and flexible to permit the national and
international community to participate in the development of the data
exchange and processing cyberinfrastructure. The center's mission could
include support for the implementation of standards including acting as
a repository for those standards and the associated software libraries.

Some of the types of data (both raw and analyzed) that should be
generated, described, exchanged and analyzed in standard ways include:
genomic data, transcriptome data, proteomic data, metabolome data,
interactome data, phenotypic data including morphologic, developmental,
biochemical and anatomical data, image data of several types such as
confocal microscopy or photographs of phenotypes, crystallographic and
protein structural data, phylogenetic data, relevant geographical
information system data such as climate or ecotype, ontologies,
mathematical and computational models - both derivation and
implementation, biodiversity data, including specimen and observational
data, metadata for data and data pipelines.

Providing basic cyberinfrastructure to make these types of data, models,
and data and model descriptors available to the broad plant science
community should be a key part of the center's core mission. Some of
these data standards either exist or are emerging. The center should
interact with these groups to facilitate the development and adaptation
of community-wide standards and play a central role in facilitating the
dissemination of these standards to the larger research community.

**Community Training and Standard Implementation:** A critical element
of cyberinfrastructure is the training of community members in the use
of these standards and their associated software and applications. To
this end the center should enable the development of novel software or
integration of existing software into the center's operational and
training framework.

Software supported by the center should have a flexible interface
useable, when appropriate, by biologists, and an interface specification
that permits the linking of new analytic and visualization modules with
a minimum of additional coding. In addition, software should have an
understandable, published Application Programming Interface (API).
Whenever possible, disseminated software and software standards
associated with the center should be widely available. The use of open
source is therefore strongly encouraged.

Interoperability of software tools and databases associated with the
center should be a part of the center's core mission. Such
interoperability is critical for successful cyberinfrastructure to
facilitate discovery and third party use of data and tools. This
interoperability mission should encompass the broad international plant
science community, not only the center's research mission. The center
should seek collegial partnerships with existing biological database and
repositories, where practical, in consulting on issues of standards and
interoperability. The center may serve as a repository and assume
responsibility for curation for data sets within its core mission if it
is deemed to fill a missing link to enable existing databases to
interoperate. The center should seek to enable the persistence of
critical data sets and software tools. Grants under the aegis of the
center could address the issue of persistence, possibly with center
support. An example of such a role could be to provide a permanent home
for project-specific plant databases and data sets for which there is
not an immediate solution for permanent archiving. As this is a critical
issue beyond the plant community, the center should be proactive in
enabling a more permanent and robust mechanism of data persistence with
other centers.

**Goal 4: Outreach to the broader community**

The Center should serve as an umbrella under which outreach programs
will be developed and coordinated. The primary participants in the
Center's outreach program should be those integrally involved in
outreach. One of the goals of such a program in addition to the target
audiences of the outreach programs is to encourage the culture of all
scientists involved to become proactive and sharing in terms of
outreach, data sharing, data annotation, and management of new
technologies.

Utilizing the developed infrastructure and resources in the proposed
Center, these efforts should be consolidated into a well-designed
program that would have more impact because it would be an integral part
of the Center and not just an afterthought. In addition the Center
should provide more long-term infrastructure than individual efforts and
therefore provide a foundation upon which future outreach and education
efforts will be built. The Center should foster an opportunity for close
interactions between outreach and science professionals, and the Center
outreach program could provide leverage in outreach by providing
opportunities for research into impact and needs assessments of science
outreach programs in general.

What efforts might a Center engage in with regard to outreach? Some
examples are:

-   Organize a well-annotated portal of available tools to facilitate
    outreach (software, websites, Powerpoint presentations) and sponsor
    workshops to introduce other scientists to these resources -- to
    avoid reinventing the outreach wheel and to optimize efforts.

-   Sponsor workshops for people involved in doing outreach, including
    scientists and outreach coordinators. Working groups could be
    organized to discuss specific types of outreach like the workshop
    organized by Lenore Reiser that led to the publication in *Genetics*
    (**166**: 1601-9, 2004) about not reinventing the "Outreach wheel".
    The Center could sponsor workshops that would offer training and
    equipment for particular outreach efforts. These workshops could
    explore the specific problems of developing outreach programs with
    minority populations, such as American Indians.

-   Provide travel funds and release time for faculty at
    minority-serving institutions and community colleges to participate
    in the ongoing science efforts at the Center -- a type of sabbatical
    for providing scientific training for individuals who would
    otherwise not have such opportunities. In this light, one suggestion
    was that postdoctoral fellows at the center may wish to have some
    teaching experience, and after suitable introductory training, may
    agree to teach at minority-serving and community colleges as a way
    of providing teaching leave for faculty at those institutions.

**Outreach Target Audiences:** Since Center outreach cannot effectively
support all potential end-users, the target audiences should be
prioritized with respect to the relative amount of impact such efforts
would have and the appropriate coverage of underrepresented minorities.
The workshop participants suggested that the high impact tier could be:

-   Journalists

-   Policy-makers at all levels

-   K-12 and small/community college teachers

**Other Issues for Consideration**

In addition to the goals and missions of a plant cyberinfrastructure
center and the possible mechanisms for realizing the goals as
articulated above, participants discussed and provided general
suggestions for possible core infrastructure and staffing needs,
assessment and international collaboration.

**Core infrastructure and staffing:** The Center could support on-site
activities as well as activities that take advantage of unique off-site
technical facilities. There should be a core infrastructure and staff at
the center to accommodate the postdoctoral fellows, visiting scientists,
and project participants. The core staff could largely be grouped into
Directorate (executive director, education and training director and
outreach coordinator), IT support (IT director, systems and database
administrators and bioinformatics analyst) and Administration (business
administrator and administrative assistant). The Center should be
associated with a University or other research institution, to provide
access to libraries, advanced scientific computing, and other
facilities. However, the Center should also be administered in a way
that ensures independence in pursuit of its scientific mission. To
ensure effective pursuit of the core mission, implementing
cyberinfrastructure that facilitates synthesis in plant biology,
feedback and creative input of scientific staff and visitors into
decision making for the center is essential. A key recommendation is
that checks and balances be instituted through two bodies, a Scientific
Advisory Committee concerned with strategic planning and a Board of
Directors concerned with more immediate goals and projects.

**Assessment:** The center should include a robust assessment component
both to determine the needs of the scientific community it serves and to
measure the impact of its activities, including training and outreach.
One possibility of implementing assessment made at the workshop was to
form partnerships with social science departments and/or individuals who
study large-scale coordination projects. There may be other models of
carrying out assessment.

Measurement of impact could include

1.  How many visiting scientists who would not normally have access to
    the various facilities utilize the center?

2.  How much synthesis occurred as reflected in the start of new areas
    of research or the rapid contributions to current areas of research?

3.  Is the general public more scientifically literate? If outreach
    efforts (via Center journalists, etc) are effective, then the
    average citizen's science knowledge base should have improved. This
    can be assessed in various ways.

4.  Track the careers of postdoctoral fellows that are trained at the
    Center to observe the manner in which they develop their own
    research careers in terms of its multidisciplinary nature and their
    outreach and training activities.

**International collaboration:** An ideal center should be as inclusive
as possible in the participation of the projects by scientists
internationally, and should leverage other similar activities being
carried out in other countries. Internationally, several limited efforts
towards improving cyberinfrastructure, data availability and integration
are underway, but there is still a gap to bridge until these bear fruit
for many plant biologists. An ambitious center could, in this
background, play a vital role in consolidating these efforts and
bringing them together to have impact on essential plant biology
questions. One recommendation is that the center should be open to
international scientists as postdoctoral scholars. In addition, the
implemented cyberinfrastructure will require global components, and
international coordination (e.g., standards for interoperability) is
essential. Other efforts towards consolidating cyberinfrastructure for
plant biology need to be considered as well as experimental data and
analytical tools. The center should be both open and outreaching. For
example, information, tools, data and standards should be open
internationally, and the center should also actively participate in
international standardization efforts and seek interoperability with
international data centers. Frequently, funding is restricted to a
specific project. The center should aim to provide a space where
international projects can meet to discuss and synchronize their
approaches, e.g. by setting up workshops for standards implementation.
The center should aim at international leadership in defining strategies
for plant cyberinfrastructure in an inclusive fashion, i.e., as stated
above, not dictating standards, but also not waiting for broad
consensus. International collaboration will be essential for the broad
effort required for successful implementation of standards.

The Center could also play a role in coordinating outreach efforts both
in developed and developing countries. A loose group of international
scientists now attempts to focus on issues (e.g., regulatory, ethical,
scientific) of concern to the general public and end users of the
technologies that plant scientists develop. With the leadership of a
Center these efforts could be made more coordinated and also allow the
expertise of scientists integrally involved in these efforts to be made
available to others.

It would seem appropriate for this center, which is expected to become
one of the most prestigious in the world, to play a role in enabling
investigators in developing countries to benefit from
cyberinfrastructure. The challenges in accessing cyberinfrastructure are
especially acute in developing countries. The center could play an
important role in this area. by inviting scientists from developing
countries for short internships in the center, providing a limited
helpdesk service where scientists from developing countries can request
computational support, and including international participants in the
workshops and planning boards.

**Conclusion**

A plant science synthesis center could provide a unique opportunity to
bring together in a cohesive resource a robust combination of complex
infrastructure, support services, expertise, and focus that is not
readily achievable by individual research groups. A center can act as a
nucleus to draw together communities that, otherwise, may have few
opportunities for real interaction. By drawing scientists from diverse
fields such as mathematics and statistics, the center could attract
individuals who may otherwise not be attracted to the plant sciences.
Acting together with center resources, such communities of scientists
can bring novel insights and creative new approaches, taking on the
grand challenges presented by modern plant biology.

**Recommendations**

1.  There is a strong need to create a plant cyberinfrastructure center
    to promote the integration of diverse and large-scale genomics and
    other data to address a few fundamental problems in plant biology
    using multi-disciplinary approaches.

2.  A core mission of the center should be to train a new generation of
    scientists who can combine multi-disciplinary approaches and utilize
    data in public repositories maximally.

3.  The center should be composed of an entity that is connected to a
    number of adjunct institutions with different types of scientific
    expertise and facilities.

4.  The core infrastructure and staffing should follow the successful
    models of NCEAS and NESCent and designate enough core staff to
    facilitate the activities of the center efficiently.

5.  The center should provide an umbrella infrastructure to coordinate
    disparate outreach activities and train students and faculty in
    achieving a comfort level in interacting with the public about plant
    science and its importance.

6.  The center should maximally leverage existing databases and
    standards to promote international integration of data.

**Disclaimer**

The workshop described in this report was supported by the National
Science Foundation under Grant number DBI-0550931. Any opinions,
findings, or conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.