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About Plant Ontology (PO)

The Plant Ontology is a controlled vocabulary (ontology) that describes plant anatomy and morphology and stages of development for all plants. The goal of the PO is to establish a semantic framework for meaningful cross-species queries across gene expression and phenotype data sets from plant genomics and genetics experiments.
Beginning in January 2011 (Version #14), the Plant Ontology was merged into a single ontology file (from two separate files) encompasing the following two aspects:

  • Plant Anatomical Entity

    Botanical terms describing plant structures and other antomical entities and the relationships between them. Examples of plant anatomical entities are plant structures (PO:0009011) such as plant organ (PO:0009008), plant cell (PO:0009002), whole plant (PO:0000003), portion of plant tissue (PO:0009007), and vascular system (PO:0000034), etc.

  • Plant Structure Development Stage

    A controlled vocabulary of terms describing the stages of plant structure development. Example of plant structure development stages are: plant tissue development stage (PO:0025423), leaf development stage (PO:0001050), whole plant development stage (PO:0007033), seed development stage (PO:0001170), and sporophyte development stage (PO:0028002), etc.

How can the PO be used?

Integrating the PO into your annotations and bioinformatics portals will facilitate cross-database queries and the comparative analysis of gene expression and phenotypes.

You can ask questions such as:

  • What differential set of genes regulates the development of a leaf or leaf-like structure found in angiosperms, bryophytes and gymnosperms?
  • What phenotypes and expressed genes are common to flower development in both dicots and monocots?

    • To answer these questions (and many others), PO terms are being used by databases such as TAIR, NASC, Gramene, SGN and MaizeGDB to describe expression patterns of genes and the phenotypes of mutants and natural variants.

    What's New...!       Become a PO fan on Facebook and follow PO News

    News Archive...

    New Release: April 2012

    The latest release of the Plant Ontology, version #17, is available on our Ontology Browser.

    This full release features almost 140 new terms, and marks a major revision to the plant structure development stage branch of the PO, including many new and revised terms for the whole plant development stage. It also includes new annotations for Gossypium hirsutum, Picea spp. and updated annotations for many other species.

    New feature: The Plant Anatomy Glossary. Visit the glossary for a quick way to find definitions of PO terms.

    For more information and to view a summary of the latest changes, please visit: April 2012 Release Page

    PO Web Services

    Come check out our prototype PO web services for providing PO terms from the AmiGO database.

    Upcoming Presentations

    Botany 2012
    July 7-11th, 2012, Columbus, OH
    The PO will host a Plant Ontology Workshop on Sunday, July 8th. For more details, please visit the Botany 2012 Workshop Page.

    Plant Biology 2012
    July 20th-24th, 2012, Autin, Texas
    More details TBA...

    Release Notes

    The latest release, version #17 (April 2012) is now available on our Ontology Browser.

    Find the most recent information on the database and website changes by visiting the Release Notes page.

    Participants and Contributors

    The Oregon State University, New York Botanical Garden and the Cornell University are Consortium's core funded members. Collaborators and contributors include the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies project (OBO Foundry), the Gene Ontology Consortium (GO), the Generation Challenge Programme, SoyBase, the Solanaceae Genomics Network, the Arabidopsis Information Resource TAIR, MaizeGDB, PLEXdb, the International Rice Information System (IRIS), Oryzabase and the Moss Computational Biology Resource (COSMOSS) / (University of Freiburg).

    Acknowledgements

    We kindly acknowledge the Gene Ontology Consortium, all the projects using PO in their applications and all the reviewers for their valuable feedback and intellectual inputs. The core activities on ontology development, mapping to common use vocabularies, outreach and training are funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #0822201). It was previously supported by the NSF Award #0321685 to the Gramene database.


      

    Last modified: Fri Apr 6 17:12:51 2012

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