I recently finished Light Eaters: The New Science of Plant Intelligence which was an interesting look at some of the recent, and recently revived, research into how plants interact with one another and with the world at large. If you haven’t read it, and are interested in some of the contentious areas of current scientific research in botany, then I’d recommend it.

In the book, there are two plants which are mentioned multiple times: Boquila trifoliolata and Arabidopsis thaliana. Boquila, also known as the chameleon vine due to the way it changes its structure to fit in with neighboring plants is fascinating, and the book covers it in detail. The latter, Arabidopsis, is the default plant for molecular and genetic experiments in botany, and has a rather storied history which can be read about in [this excellent article] from Knowable Magazine.

This got me thinking more about the bioinformatics side of things, and how little I know. What I’d like to do is explore this in a couple of ways, while also building out some tools to sharpen my skills:

• Build a searchable and indexed dataset specializing in Arabidopsis thaliana
• Create a learning tool that builds on a genome viewer.

This will be a longer term project, and I will link updates here.