Plant Biology Databases: A Needs Assessment

We review the anticipated needs of the plant genome research community for long-lived data collections. We find that there is an increasing need for such repositories, and offer guidelines for balancing the funding of data production projects with those aimed to manage and integrate the data. In particular, we find that there is a pressing need to develop a trained cadre of skilled knowledge workers who are able to curate complex biological data, and to provide this cadre with a system of stable funding that enables data repositories to be established and maintained over extended periods of time. We note approvingly the current trend of species-specific databases to expand into comparative genomics-minded clade-oriented databases, but caution that new technologies are needed to facilitate the transparent integration of data among these databases. Conclusions and specific recommendations begin on page 34.