Beta Release of iPlant Discovery Environment

iPlant Co-PI Dan Stanzione announced that the first public beta release of the iPlant Collaborative's discovery environment (DE) software would take place in April 2010. With this release, the iPlant DE:

· demonstrates the component model and framework for iPlant DEs;Screen shot from iPlant Tree Visualization prototype
· demonstrates the new iPlant user interface (UI) and UI standards;
· serves as the basis for all future development and tool integration in the DEs;
· debuts the authorization and authentication framework to be used by iPlant;
· demonstrates the ability of the DEs to run jobs on TeraGrid and other large systems;
· demonstrates integration of existing bioinformatics tools into an integrated workflow; and
· debuts collaboration facilities of DEs.

Beyond serving as a reference technology platform for all future iPlant DEs, this first release offers functionality that is immediately useful to practicing biologists. In particular, this release addresses a sample problem identified in the iPlant Tree of Life (iPToL) Grand Challenge Project: the application of Phylogenetic Independent Contrasts (PIC) to large phylogenetic trees. Phylogenetic researchers using the first release are immediately able to:

· upload a tree of the user’s choosing in a variety of file formats, or to import a tree from the popular TreeBase or MorphoBank databases;
· edit and manipulate tree and trait data online via the web interface;
· apply PIC analysis using the “Contrast” tool from the Phylip package;
· visualize trees via either an integrated web-based viewer, or to select a new prototype scalable viewer now under development at iPlant;
· share results with other collaborators, including the ability of a user to grant various levels of access to other users and groups; and
· upload results to public databases, including TreeBase and MorphoBank.

This initial release has been tested and validated with trees for up to 50,000 taxa. Future releases will be designed to support up to 500,000 taxa.