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The previous blog mentioned crop science and the John Innes Centre (meanwhile another broadsheet obituary for Chris Lamb has appeared), and the role of research in ‘biomedical agriculture’ to produce nutritionally enhanced plants. Continuing this latter theme, I paid a visit last week to Warwick HRI at Wellesbourne, formerly Horticulture Research International and prior to that the National Vegetable Research Station. Warwick HRI was once an institute of BBSRC (it is now part of the University of Warwick), and is a leading centre for research into important horticultural crops. I was introduced to several recent recruits, many from abroad, who described some very impressive work indeed. Horticulture is an important part of BBSRC’s landscape, especially given our interest in Food Security, and it was pleasing to know that this research area has a sound intellectual (and financial) base. The genome sequence of the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans has just been published online. I was pleased to note that several UK and BBSRC-funded institutes and laboratories – including Warwick HRI – have been able to participate in the experiments leading to this important milestone.
The rate of acquisition of genomics (and other) data is continuing its massive rise, and we are thinking hard about how best to make such data and metadata available to the community; last week I presented on this topic to the Research Base Funders Forum, and also led a workshop/discussion on these issues at the thoroughly enjoyable biennial meeting with our BBSRC Fellows. This week, I am leading a BBSRC mission to the US to visit several funders and laboratories involved in informatics and data-intensive science, an emerging field that recognises that as data volumes rise beyond the ability of existing computer architectures to deal with them effectively, new approaches (with their attendant intellectual, and perhaps commercial, opportunities) will need to come forward. I am very keen that BBSRC stays ahead of the curve here. To this end, we shall soon be sending out to our community a survey of bioinformatics needs, and we are also developing plans for a workshop on the very important topic of data visualisation. I was quite surprised to discover how hard it has proved for many folk to discover what kinds of tools are available ‘out there’ to assist in dealing with the floods of data and literature, and would draw attention to our help page on how to set up feed readers/blog aggregators to help stay informed in a painless way. Even with these, though, one has to know what to look for to find it (I was informed about the useful and free online genomics data analyser Galaxy, of which I had not previously heard). There may be merit in setting up portals to assist with this, and there are also implications for our training activities, that we shall be taking on board.
The topic of data sharing is intimately linked to data analysis, and two articles in the latest Nature on data and tool sharing before and after publication, including one with BBSRC co-authorship, provide a timely reminder of the importance of this for the science commons. All BBSRC grantholders explain how they will adhere to our data sharing policy at the time of submitting proposals and (if successful) sign up to them as a condition of grant. In modern science, data are as important as hypotheses.
- Bell G, Hey T, Szalay A: Beyond the data deluge. Science 2009; 323:1297-1298.
- Birney E et mult al.: Prepublication data sharing. Nature 2009; 461:168-170.
- Kell DB, Oliver SG: Here is the evidence, now what is the hypothesis? The complementary roles of inductive and hypothesis-driven science in the post-genomic era. Bioessays 2004; 26:99-105.
- Schofield PN et mult al.: Post-publication sharing of data and tools. Nature 2009; 461:171-173.
- Haas, BJ et mult al. : Genome sequence and analysis of the Irish potato famine pathogen Phytophthora infestans. Nature 2009 Advanced online publication doi:10.1038/nature08358.
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