Building an environment to facilitate discoveries for plant sciences

Abstract

The iPlant Collaborative is an NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure (CI) effort directed towards the plant sciences community. This paper enumerates the key concepts, middleware, tools, and extensions that create the unique capabilities of the iPlant Discovery Environment (DE) that provide access to our CI. The DE is a rich web-based application that brings flexible CI capabilities to a wide audience affiliated with the plant sciences, from computational biologists, bioinformaticians, applications developers, to bench biologists.