DOE taps Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to develop biofuels knowledgebase

In New York, researchers at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have been awarded funding to create out of many separate streams of biological information a single, integrated cyber-“knowledgebase” that will focus on a specific assortment of plants and microbes that the DOE hopes to exploit to produce biofuels, to sequester carbon in the ecosystem, and to clean up environmental pollution. Using cloud computing, scientists across institutions will be able to query the knoweldgebase in a highly flexible fashion, and on a democratized basis, since the knoweldgebase will be accessible to scientists everywhere meaning they can gather and store essentially similar data sets.