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Example Searches:

type: endosperm or PO:0009089 and select 'PO terms'
type: CONSTANS or AT5G15850 and select 'Annotations'



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Link to: Plant Anatomy Glossary; PO Web Services


About Plant Ontology (PO)

The Plant Ontology is a controlled vocabulary (ontology) that describes plant anatomy and morphology and stages of development for all plants. The goal of the PO is to establish a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across gene expression and phenotype data sets from plant genomics and genetics experiments.
Beginning in January 2011 (Version #14), the Plant Ontology was merged into a single ontology file (from two separate files) encompassing the following two aspects:
  • Plant Anatomical Entity

    Botanical terms describing plant structures and other antomical entities and the relationships between them. Examples of plant anatomical entities are plant structures (PO:0009011) such as plant organ (PO:0009008), plant cell (PO:0009002), whole plant (PO:0000003), portion of plant tissue (PO:0009007), and vascular system (PO:0000034), etc.

  • Plant Structure Development Stage

    A controlled vocabulary of terms describing the stages of plant structure development. Example of plant structure development stages are: plant tissue development stage (PO:0025423), leaf development stage (PO:0001050), whole plant development stage (PO:0007033), seed development stage (PO:0001170), and sporophyte development stage (PO:0028002), etc.

How can the PO be used?

Integrating the PO into your annotations and bioinformatics portals will facilitate cross-database queries and the comparative analysis of gene expression and phenotypes.

You can ask questions such as:

  • What differential set of genes regulates the development of a leaf or leaf-like structure found in angiosperms, bryophytes and gymnosperms?
  • What phenotypes and expressed genes are common to flower development in both dicots and monocots?
  • To answer these questions (and many others), PO terms are being used by databases such as TAIR, NASC, Gramene, SGN and MaizeGDB to describe expression patterns of genes and the phenotypes of mutants and natural variants.

    What's New...!       Become a PO fan on Facebook and follow PO News

    New Release: December 2012

    The latest release; version #19, is available on our Ontology Browser.
    For more information and to view a summary of the latest changes, please visit: December 2012 Release Page

    New Publication:

    The latest Plant Ontology paper is now available online from Plant and Cell Physiology.
    This paper focuses the plant anatomical entity branch of the PO, describing the organizing principles, resources available to users, and examples of comparative analyses.

    Image Annotation Software

    AISO
    Annotation of Image Segments with Ontologies, v0.2.1 (beta)
    AISO is an interactive image segmentation tool designed to allow curators to segment and annotate image data with ontology terms.
    Download it here! (Available on Linux and Mac OS X 64-bit)

    Upcoming Presentations:

    Plant and Animal Genome 2013 
    January 12th - 16th, 2013, San Diego, CA

    The PO will host an Ontology Workshop entitled "Applications of Ontologies for Plant and Animal Genomics."

    We will present a software demo of AISO: Annotation of Image Segments with Ontologies, on Sunday, Jan. 13th, at 5:20 pm.

    Come visit us at the Outreach Booth in the Exhibit Hall

    News Archive


    Participants and Contributors

    The Oregon State University, New York Botanical Garden and the Cornell University are Consortium's core funded members. Collaborators and contributors include 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, PLEXdb, the International Rice Information System (IRIS), Oryzabase and the Moss Computational Biology Resource (COSMOSS) / (University of Freiburg).

    Acknowledgements

    We kindly acknowledge the Gene Ontology Consortium, all the projects using PO in their applications and all the reviewers for their valuable feedback and intellectual inputs. The core activities on ontology development, mapping to common use vocabularies, outreach and training are funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #0822201). It was previously supported by the NSF Award #0321685 to the Gramene database.


      

    Last modified: Thu Mar 21 10:30:17 2013


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