Plant Ontology (PO)

• Plant Structure

  A controlled vocabulary of botanical terms describing morphological and anatomical structures representing organ, tissue and cell types and their relationships. Examples are gametophyte, parenchyma, guard cell, etc.

• Growth and developmental stages

  A controlled vocabulary of terms describing (i) whole plant growth stages and (ii) plant structure developmental stages. Examples are seedling growth, rosette growth, leaf development stages, embryo development stages, flower development stages, etc.

Plant ontology is not an extensive collection of botanical terms, but rather a complex hierarchical structure in which botanical concepts are described by their meaning and by relationship to each other. The main purpose of these vocabularies is to facilitate cross database querying and to foster consistent use of these vocabularies in the annotation of tissue and/or growth stage specific expression of genes, proteins and phenotypes. Educational aspect of the plant ontology is to some extent limited; this is imposed by the structure of the ontology itself and the limitations of the current software.

Participants and Contributors

The Plant Ontology Consortium core members are Oregon State University and the Gramene database, The New York Botanical Garden and Cornell University.

Some of the POC Collaborators and Contributors are: The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies project (OBO Foundry), the Gene Ontology Consortium (GO), the Generation Challenge Programme, SoyBase, the Solanaceae Genomics Network, the Arabidopsis Information Resource TAIR, MaizeGDB, the University of Missouri at St. Louis, the Missouri Botanical Garden at St. Louis MO, the International Rice Informations System (IRIS) and Oryzabase.

News Archive...

Beta Version of New Release of Plant Ontology Database Now Available
Aug 12, 2010.

A beta version of the latest release of the PO is now available on our AmiGO Browser . The POC is seeking feedback on the beta release. Please use the Feedback Link or contact us at po-discuss@plantontology.org.

For more information, please visit Summary of Changes.

PO-Gramene Annotation Workshop at Plant Biology 2010
A workshop to demonstrate the Phenote Annotation Tool was held at the ASPB Plant Biology Meeting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. You can find a link to the workshop page at: Phenote Workshop (you may need to login)

Plant Ontology represented at Outreach Booth at Plant Biology 2010
The Plant Ontology organized an Outreach Booth at the ASPB Plant Biology 2010 Meeting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Along with the PO were Gramene, MaizeGDB , SGN, TAIR and BAR . Many people stopped by to ask questions and learn about the Resources available for Plant Genomics.

April 28, 2010
OBO files for Flowering Plants on the download page have been updated to version 1.2 of the OBO spec. No changes to terms have been made.