An important element of the NSF Plant Genome Research Program is to develop shared resources and research tools that will enable plant genome research to advance efficiently, rapidly and in a cost-effective manner. At the Visual Computing Laboratory of the University of Pittsburgh we are developing a research and education tool that can be used by scientists to annotate, retrieve and relate plant genomic information. This plant genome information assistant will be accessible through the Internet using a browser. The users - scientists, educators and students - can place annotated active tags called adlets on important genome data items. The plant genome information assistant is able to provide up-to-date, personalized information to the user. Moreover these adlets are active and can travel from node to node, collecting additional information. The adlets can be organized hierarchically so that only adlets in a certain class are active during a user's search. For example an expert may want to retrieve information annotated by fellow scientists only, while a student may want to retrieve information annotated by teacher, fellow students and expert scientists. We will explore the prototyping of a plant genome information assistant for a single plant such as the flowering plant Arabidopsis Thaliana. The system will be tested by researchers and graduate students of the University of Pittsburgh.
A graduate research assistant and an undergraduate student assistant are needed immediately for this project. If you are interested in the graduate RA position or the undergraduate assistant position or interested in joining this project, please contact Professor S. K. Chang (chang@cs.pitt.edu)
Example of a Plant Genome Map
Example of a plant image
