Congratulations to Professor Nick Provart on his recent Genome Canada grant!

Congratulations to Professor Nick Provart, who has received Genome Canada funding for his team’s grant “From ePlants to eEcosystems: New Frameworks and Tools for Sharing, Accessing, Exploring and Integrating ‘Omic Data from Plants” as part of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (B/CB) Competition.

This award was also featured in a UofT News article on the Arts & Science Website.

The original ePlant system, developed as part of a previous Genome Canada effort, integrates many data types but was not configured for phenotype data. Amongst its many applications, phenotype data provide important information on traits of interest to plant breeders and foresters.

This grant provides funding for a new module to integrate the wide variety of data available, including ecosystem data, phenotypes and genotypes into ePlant. This will be done for the already existing ePlant species and any new ePlant species to be developed as part of this project. The researchers will also open the ePlant system to the research community to build a larger ePlant ecosystem of information. This online system will act as a resource where plant biologists will be able to share their datasets.

Ultimately, these tools can help to accelerate the task of identifying useful genes to feed, shelter and power a world of nine billion people by the year 2050.