Australia
January 25, 2016

A new database of valuable protein information for economically important crop plants will be a significant resource for crop improvement and global food security.

CropPAL is a new catalogue of location information about barley, wheat, rice and maize proteins which has arisen out of global research.

Proteins represent the building blocks of all living cells. In order to improve crop plants to cope with rising temperatures, drought, flooding and salinity, protein function and location must be known.

A greater understanding of proteins in crop plants will enable more targeted breeding of crop species in the future.

As an open access research tool where protein location information is collated, cropPAL is a valuable asset to assist plant researchers, biotechnology companies and the crop breeding industry.

“A lot of research data is scattered, and remains under explored,” says Dr Cornelia Hooper, lead researcher on the project from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology at the University of Western Australia.

“Pulling all this data together into a single database makes for a very powerful research tool.”

The resource will accelerate solutions that address challenges such as drought, salinity and nitrogen starvation in major global crops. 

“We found that there is huge amounts of beneficial data already available to improve crops for future harsh environments, it had just never been put together to reveal its potential” says Professor Harvey Millar, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology at UWA where the project is being undertaken.

“What cropPal does is connect researchers, industry and entrepreneurs with this information about proteins in crops from around the world. In some sense it will be a pal, a help, to people who want to know more and innovate using this shared knowledge”.

The project is funded by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS aims to improve visibility, access and re-use of valuable research data as part of a global open-access data movement in science.

CropPAL has transformed unstructured information and thousands of new computer predictions of protein locations from hundreds of research studies generated over the last 10 years by over 300 research institutions around the world into an Australian-housed central research open-access data collection for efficient use and discovery.

The project has a bright future with plans to expand the crop collection in 2016 to include seven additional species, including grape, sorghum and canola.

A detailed overview of cropPAL features in the annual Databases Special Issue of the journal Plant and Cell Physiology released last week.

Website: http://www.uwa.edu.au

Published: January 25, 2016