Confirmation of the NFDI Consortium "DataPLANT" by Joint Science Conference

The German Research Foundation is funding the "DataPLANT" consortium as part of the NFDI under the leadership of the University of Freiburg with approximately eleven million euros. The eScience department, together with researchers at the Freiburg Bio-Campus and throughout Germany, has launched and successfully applied for a "Fundamental Plant Research" initiative.

Freiburg University press release: "Modern crop research investigates the molecular principles of plant life that determine aspects such as growth, crop yield and biomass production, for example. It also makes a significant contribution to securing food supplies worldwide in the face of growing demand and changing environmental conditions. Researchers from different disciplines are working together in order to establish how and why plants function in the way they do, and analyzing amongst other things the natural genetic diversity and evolution of plants. “One goal of this research is to gain a better understanding of how agricultural crops can be altered genetically and biochemically in order to help them be resilient and productive even in times of climate change and with a growing global population,” explains Ralf Reski, Professor of Plant Biotechnology at the University of Freiburg and member of the board of DataPLANT. The state-of-the-art measuring methods used generate complex and massive volumes of data, that have to be processed and interpreted by means of computers."

This complements the already ongoing activities at the university and the eScience department on research data management, the shared storage infrastructure and the Science Data Center BioDATEN.