The iPlant Collaborative, renamed Cyverse in 2017, is a virtual organization created by a cooperative agreement funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to create cyberinfrastructure for the plant sciences (botany). The NSF compared cyberinfrastructure to physical infrastructure, "... the distributed computer, information and communication technologies combined with the personnel and integrating components that provide a long-term platform to empower the modern scientific research endeavor". In September 2013 it was announced that the National Science Foundation had renewed iPlant's funding for a second 5-year term with an expansion of scope to all non-human life science research.
The project develops computing systems and software that combine computing resources, like those of TeraGrid, and bioinformatics and computational biology software. Its goal is easier collaboration among researchers with improved data access and processing efficiency. Primarily centered in the United States, it collaborates internationally.
History
Biology is relying more and more on computers. Plant biology is changing with the rise of new technologies. With the advent of bioinformatics, computational biology, DNA sequencing, geographic information systems and others computers can greatly assist researchers who study plant life looking for solutions to challenges in medicine, biofuels, biodiversity, agriculture and problems like drought tolerance, plant breeding, and sustainable farming. Many of these problems cross traditional disciplines and facilitating collaboration between plant scientists of diverse backgrounds and specialties is necessary.
In 2006, the NSF solicited proposals to create "a new type of organization – a cyberinfrastructure collaborative for plant science" with a program titled "Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative" (PSCIC) with Christopher Greer as program director. A proposal was accepted (adopting the convention of using the word "Collaborative" as a noun) and iPlant was officially created on February 1, 2008. Funding was estimated as $10 million per year over five years.
Richard Jorgensen led the team through the proposal stage and was the principal investigator (PI) from 2008 to 2009. Gregory Andrews, Vicki Chandler, Sudha Ram and Lincoln Stein served as Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs) from 2008 to 2009. In late 2009, Stephen Goff was named PI and Daniel Stanzione was added as a Co-PI. As of May 2014, Co-PI Stanzione was replaced by 4 new Co-PIs: Doreen Ware at Cold Spring Harbor, Nirav Merchant and Eric Lyons at the University of Arizona, and Matthew Vaughn at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
The iPlant project supports what has been called e-Science, which is a use of information systems technology that is being adopted by the research community in efforts such as the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), ELIXIR, and the Bamboo Technology Project that started in September 2010. iPlant is "designed to create the foundation to support the computational needs of the research community and facilitate progress toward solutions of major problems in plant biology."
The project works as a collaboration. It seeks input from the wider plant science community on what to build. Based on that input, it has enabled easier use of large data sets, created a community-driven research environment to share existing data collections within a research area and between research areas and shares data with provenance tracking. One model studied for collaboration was Wikipedia.
Several more recent National Science Foundation awards mentioned iPlant explicitly in their descriptions, as either a design pattern to follow or a collaborator with whom the recipient will work.
Institutions
The primary institution for the iPlant project is the University of Arizona, located within the BIO5 Institute in Tucson. Since its inception in 2008, personnel worked at other institutions including Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and the University of Texas at Austin in the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Purdue University and Arizona State University were part of the original project group.
Other collaborating institutions that received support from iPlant for their work on a Grand Challenge in phylogenetics starting in March 2009 included Yale University, University of Florida, and the University of Pennsylvania.
A trait evolution group was led at the University of Tennessee. A visualization workshop employing iPlant was run by Virginia Tech in 2011.