Plant Science "Grand Challenges" Cyberinfrastructure Funded by NSF

The NSF announced today announced it would be awarding $50M to the iPlant Collective, a "dynamic web portal for the Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative Community" to address the 'grand challenges' in plant science.

The effort will create a global centre bringing together (virtually and actually) computer scientists, information scientists and plant scientists to work on projects untenable until this project due to such issues as complexity, scale, discipline boundaries, lack of collaboration structures, etc.

The centre "...will bring together and leverage the resources and information generated through the National Plant Genome Initiative, enabling more breadth and depth of research in every aspect of plant science" and will serve as a model for other disciplines on how collaborative cyberinfrastructure can be applied.

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