The Figure Reviewers Didn't Like

In our previous attempts to get the Fe model published, we included the figure below. It shows how the Fe model predicts that the Fe status of the soil varied greatly across the many trays that we have run. We like it because it shows that even though the environment is changing (despite our best efforts to keep it constant) this model and others like it will allow us to account for this variation when we look at data.

The reviewers didn't like it for reasons I disagree with so vociferously I shall not repeat them here. So we left it out of the version that was submitted to PNAS.

You can see how changing the soil batch had a major effect on the Fe status of the plants. We were only able to grow plants in Fe sufficient conditions once we started watering with the Fe specific chelator HBED.

Piims is now all open source.

We have just rolled out the new version of Piims which is based on all open souce software:
the database is Postgres and the front end is run on Tomcat.

We have also added a bunch of functionalities to the lab side of the database and have fixed a large (really large) number of bugs.

Users are now able to see more of the meta-data and pictures of the trays have been visible for awhile now.

The yeast and rice versions of Piims are based on this format and should be publically available soon.

A huge thanks to all the people who worked on this:
Gemez Marshall did the bulk of the work but he had a lot of help from Mourad Ouzzani, Brad Kennedy and Maged Zereba.

Fe&P model paper is online!

Our paper showing how we can use the ionome to detect plants responding to Fe and P deficient conditions is now online at PNAS