TY - JOUR
T1 - Empowering 21st century biology
AU - Robinson, Gene E.
AU - Banks, Jody A.
AU - Padilla, Dianna K.
AU - Burggren, Warren W.
AU - Cohen, C. Sarah
AU - Delwiche, Charles F.
AU - Funk, Vicki
AU - Hoekstra, Hopi E.
AU - Jarvis, Erich D.
AU - Johnson, Loretta
AU - Martindale, Mark Q.
AU - Rio, Carlos Martinez Del
AU - Medina, Monica
AU - Salt, David E.
AU - Sinha, Saurabh
AU - Specht, Chelsea
AU - Strange, Kevin
AU - Strassmann, Joan E.
AU - Swalla, Billie J.
AU - Tomanek, Lars
N1 - Funding Information:
Virtual interdisciplinary centers with geographically dispersed partnerships will help make transformations in biology. Virtual centers could be particularly useful for the development of some of the new bioinformatic tools outlined above. Funding mechanisms that encourage the development of virtual communities to address particular biological problems have seen strong success; for example, the National Institutes of Health–funded Glue Grants (www.nigms.nih.gov/Initiatives/Collaborative/GlueGrants/), NSF-funded Research Coordination Networks (www.nsf.gov/ funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=11691), and the NSF iPlant initiative (www.iplantcollaborative.org/). iPlant is specifically designed to address the development of cyberinfrastructure to facilitate solutions to grand challenges in the plant sciences. The nanoHUB (http://nanohub.org/) is a virtual center that distributes newly developed computational tools through easily navigated interfaces to users at all levels of computer sophistication. It is easy to imagine additional virtual centers developing around new model organisms, technologies, or ways of integrating across levels of biological organization.
PY - 2010/12
Y1 - 2010/12
N2 - Several lists of grand challenges in biology have been published recently, highlighting the strong need to answer fundamental questions about how life evolves and is governed, and how to apply this knowledge to solve the pressing problems of our times. To succeed in addressing the challenges of 21st century biology, scientists need to generate, have access to, interpret, and archive more information than ever before. But for many important questions in biology, progress is stymied by a lack of essential tools. Discovering and developing necessary tools requires new technologies, applications of existing technologies, software, model organisms, and social structures. Such new social structures will promote tool building, tool sharing, research collaboration, and interdisciplinary training. Here we identify examples of the some of the most important needs for addressing critical questions in biology and making important advances in the near future.
AB - Several lists of grand challenges in biology have been published recently, highlighting the strong need to answer fundamental questions about how life evolves and is governed, and how to apply this knowledge to solve the pressing problems of our times. To succeed in addressing the challenges of 21st century biology, scientists need to generate, have access to, interpret, and archive more information than ever before. But for many important questions in biology, progress is stymied by a lack of essential tools. Discovering and developing necessary tools requires new technologies, applications of existing technologies, software, model organisms, and social structures. Such new social structures will promote tool building, tool sharing, research collaboration, and interdisciplinary training. Here we identify examples of the some of the most important needs for addressing critical questions in biology and making important advances in the near future.
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U2 - 10.1525/bio.2010.60.11.8
DO - 10.1525/bio.2010.60.11.8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:78650094727
VL - 60
SP - 923
EP - 930
JO - BioScience
JF - BioScience
SN - 0006-3568
IS - 11
ER -