Grassroots has traditionally been the result of an effort to produce an interoperable data sharing platform for the wheat community. Whilst Grassroots is by no means organism-specific, our main use cases come from the wheat community. We get most of our community feedback from plant researchers at the Earlham Institute, John Innes Centre, Bristol University, Rothamsted Research and other UK institutions, as well as from various international wheat working groups such as the RDA Wheat Data Interoperability maintenance group and the Wheat Initiative Wheat Information System expert working group. The newly awarded cross-institute programme grant, Delivering Sustainable Wheat (DSW) and its predecessor Designing Future Wheat (DFW), are flagship projects to bring the UK’s wheat researchers together to deliver new varieties relevant to the international stage, through the coordinated effort of biologists, breeders, and informaticians. As such, Grassroots is funded by the DSW programme, enabling us to build a platform that can meet the needs of not only this ambitious programme, but the wider UK and international wheat community that needs fast and openly-licenced unfettered access to the data and experimental information arising from DFW.
If you have used any of the services that Grassroots provides in your own research, we would very much appreciate that you let us know and cite us in any publications, as follows:
Bian. X, Tyrrell. S, Olvera. D, Davey R.P. The Grassroots life science data infrastructure (2017). https://grassroots.tools