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Plant Ontology (PO)

The main objective of the Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is to develop, curate and share controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe plant structures and growth and developmental stages, providing a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across databases. The Plant Ontology (PO) has been developed and maintained with the primary goal to facilitate and accommodate functional annotation efforts in plant databases and by the plant research community at large. The initial releases of the PO integrated existing ontologies for Arabidopsis, maize and rice; more recent versions of the ontology encompass terms relevant to Fabaceae, Solanaceae and other cereal crops. As a part of the POC project, participating databases such as TAIR, NASC, Gramene and MaizeGDB have been using PO to describe expression patterns of genes and phenotypes of mutants and natural variants. The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) is funded by the National Science Foundation.

  • Plant Structure

    A controlled vocabulary of botanical terms describing morphological and anatomical structures representing organ, tissue and cell types and their relationships. Examples are stamen, gynoecium, petal, 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 Gramene database, The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), MaizeGDB, University of Missouri at St. Louis, Missouri Botanical Garden at St. Louis MO. POC collaborators are International rice informations System (IRIS), MIPS database, Oryzabase, Open Biological Ontologies project (OBO), Gene Ontology Consortium (GO), Deep Gene project and Solanaceae Genomics Network.

What's New...!

News Archive...

iPlant collaborative announces its invitation to the plant biology community

The Plant Ontology Database is in Nucleic Acid Research 2008 DB issue

Introduce "PhenomicsWorld", a powerful image search engine for your mutant phenotypes!

Sep 8-10, 2008
GARNet-SEB Plant Symposium
Nottingham, UK

Oct 5-9, 2008
CSSA-ASA-SSSA Joint Annual Meeting
Houston, Texas, USA

Oct 12-16, 2008
The 5th Solanaceae Genome Workshop
Cologne, Germany

Oct 17-19, 2008
Frontiers in Sexual Plant Reproduction III
Tucson, Arizona, USA

Jan 10-14, 2009
Plant and Animal Genome XVII (PAG)
San Diego, CA, USA

Release notes

Find the most recent information on the database and website changes by visiting the release notes page.

Acknowledgements


  

Last modified: Mon Aug 11 11:48:41 2008

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