TY - JOUR
T1 - Current status of the multinational Arabidopsis community
AU - The Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee
AU - Parry, Geraint
AU - Provart, Nicholas J.
AU - Brady, Siobhan M.
AU - Uzilday, Baris
AU - Adams, Keith
AU - Araújo, Wagner
AU - Aubourg, Sébastien
AU - Baginsky, Sacha
AU - Bakker, Erica
AU - Bärenfaller, Katja
AU - Batley, Jacqui
AU - Beale, Mike
AU - Beilstein, Mark
AU - Belkhadir, Youssef
AU - Mendel, Gregor
AU - Berardini, Tanya
AU - Bergelson, Joy
AU - Blanco-Herrera, Francisca
AU - Brady, Siobhan
AU - Braun, Hans Peter
AU - Briggs, Steve
AU - Brownfield, Lynette
AU - Cardarelli, Maura
AU - Castellanos-Uribe, Marcos
AU - Coruzzi, Gloria
AU - Dassanayake, Maheshi
AU - De Jaeger, Geert
AU - Dilkes, Brian
AU - Doherty, Colleen
AU - Ecker, Joe
AU - Edger, Pat
AU - Edwards, David
AU - El Kasmi, Farid
AU - Eriksson, Maria
AU - Exposito-Alonso, Moises
AU - Falter-Braun, Pascal
AU - Fernie, Alisdair
AU - Ferro, Myriam
AU - Fiehn, Oliver
AU - Friesner, Joanna
AU - Greenham, Katie
AU - Guo, Yalong
AU - Hamann, Thorsten
AU - Hancock, Angela
AU - Hauser, Marie Theres
AU - Heazlewood, Joshua
AU - Ho, Cheng Hsun
AU - Hõrak, Hanna
AU - Huala, Eva
AU - Li, Song
N1 - Funding information: Oversight of the Arabidopsis informatics strategy has largely fallen to the International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium (IAIC), which was funded by the NSF until 2020. In 2018 IAIC hosted a workshop in St Louis and its “take home” recommendation was for the establishment of a centralized “annotation authority” to advise on submissions from groups for new gene names across the Arabidopsis pangenome, to establish a consistent naming scheme, to distribute this format regularly and frequently, and to encourage its adoption (International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium, 2019 ). This article also recommends community?established guidelines and standards for data and metadata formats alongside a searchable, central repository for analysis and visualization tools (such as https://conf.arabidopsis.org/display/COM/Resources ). Fortunately, the implementation of these recommendations will be facilitated by a closely linked international community and will undoubtedly be a topic discussed for inclusion within the next roadmap. GP is supported by UKRI-BBSRC grant GARNet2020 (BB/M004376/1) SMB is partially funded by an HHMI Faculty Scholar Fellowship. BU acknowledges support of his work by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜB?TAK) (Grant No: 118Z137). MASC Country representatives provide an opinion on the current status of Arabidopsis research in their countries. It is challenging to obtain a consistent metric for these evaluations as different countries will view their situation from different starting positions. For example, the United Kingdom publishes around 200 Arabidopsis papers per year and there is ~£8M in annual 'Responsive mode' Government funding for “Arabidopsis research” yet this represents a reduction in funding, so the situation is not as healthy as in previous years. However, other countries have low to no funding in research specifically dedicated to Arabidopsis, yet have a positive opinion toward research in this area, for example, “In Brazil even though there is virtually no such funding programs towards Arabidopsis, the number of institutions using Arabidopsis in their research is growing each year. We are seeing a gradual increase in the usage of Arabidopsis as a model plant for molecular and genetic studies due to its power as an easily manipulated model system to investigate gene functions.” Similarly in India, although there is no earmarked financial support for Arabidopsis research from the Government, scientists can compete for grants dedicated for basic science and many projects are regularly funded on Arabidopsis exclusively; “many more projects use Arabidopsis as a system to validate genes from crop plants. Consequently, the overall quality of publications….…has improved considerably.”
PY - 2020/8/2
Y1 - 2020/8/2
N2 - The multinational Arabidopsis research community is highly collaborative and over the past thirty years these activities have been documented by the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC). Here, we (a) highlight recent research advances made with the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana; (b) provide summaries from recent reports submitted by MASC subcommittees, projects and resources associated with MASC and from MASC country representatives; and (c) initiate a call for ideas and foci for the “fourth decadal roadmap,” which will advise and coordinate the global activities of the Arabidopsis research community.
AB - The multinational Arabidopsis research community is highly collaborative and over the past thirty years these activities have been documented by the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC). Here, we (a) highlight recent research advances made with the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana; (b) provide summaries from recent reports submitted by MASC subcommittees, projects and resources associated with MASC and from MASC country representatives; and (c) initiate a call for ideas and foci for the “fourth decadal roadmap,” which will advise and coordinate the global activities of the Arabidopsis research community.
KW - Arabidopsis thaliana
KW - collaboration
KW - Research Network
KW - roadmap
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85095770206&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/pld3.248
DO - 10.1002/pld3.248
M3 - Article
C2 - 32775952
AN - SCOPUS:85095770206
SN - 2475-4455
VL - 4
JO - Plant Direct
JF - Plant Direct
IS - 7
M1 - e00248
ER -