How computer science meets plant world

It is interesting to see how biologist and computer scientists share their expertise to study the complex world of the early responses of higher plants to abiotic stresses such as drought, flooding, heat, cold, ozone, and salt. 

The key to understanding the stress responses is signal transduction pathways, and the way researchers of  the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech are addressing the problem is quite unusual:

They will archive signaling pathways for abiotic stress responses in a database, ”Beacon",  a new systems biology tool that allows the plant biologist to construct and edit signaling pathways. With this information, it will be possible to integrate current and future data over multiple scales of a cell’s organization and across species.

Their work should allow the computational and statistical means to assess if the activity of one molecule causes a response in a second molecule. Innovative components of the Beacon system allow the possibility of simulating particular environmental conditions in order to identify potential new connections in these networks.

Let's wait and see how things will go!


http://www.eng.vt.edu/news/plant-biology-meets-computational-wizardry