A new in vitro monitoring system reveals a specific influence of Arabidopsis nitrogen nutrition on its susceptibility to Alternaria brassicicola at the seedling stage.

Background: Seedling growth is an early phase of plant development highly susceptible to environmental factors such as soil nitrogen (N) availability or presence of seed-borne pathogens. Whereas N plays a central role in plant-pathogen interactions, its role has never been studied during this early phase for the interaction between Arabidopsis thaliana and Alternaria brassicicola, a seed-transmitted necrotrophic fungus. The aim of the present work was to develop an in vitro monitoring system allowing to study the impact of the fungus on A.

DIVIS: a semantic DIstance to improve the VISualisation of heterogeneous phenotypic datasets.

Background: Thanks to the wider spread of high-throughput experimental techniques, biologists are accumulating large amounts of datasets which often mix quantitative and qualitative variables and are not always complete, in particular when they regard phenotypic traits. In order to get a first insight into these datasets and reduce the data matrices size scientists often rely on multivariate analysis techniques. However such approaches are not always easily practicable in particular when faced with mixed datasets.

Phenoplant: a web resource for the exploration of large chlorophyll fluorescence image datasets.

Background: Image analysis is increasingly used in plant phenotyping. Among the various imaging techniques that can be used in plant phenotyping, chlorophyll fluorescence imaging allows imaging of the impact of biotic or abiotic stresses on leaves. Numerous chlorophyll fluorescence parameters may be measured or calculated, but only a few can produce a contrast in a given condition.

A community standard format for the representation of protein affinity reagents.

Protein affinity reagents (PARs), most commonly antibodies, are essential reagents for protein characterization in basic research, biotechnology, and diagnostics as well as the fastest growing class of therapeutics. Large numbers of PARs are available commercially; however, their quality is often uncertain. In addition, currently available PARs cover only a fraction of the human proteome, and their cost is prohibitive for proteome scale applications.

Mass data exploration in oncology: an information synthesis approach.

New technologies and equipment allow for mass treatment of samples and research teams share acquired data on an always larger scale. In this context scientists are facing a major data exploitation problem. More precisely, using these data sets through data mining tools or introducing them in a classical experimental approach require a preliminary understanding of the information space, in order to direct the process.