Researcher Spotlight
Lindsay Clark
I am a plant geneticist with particular interests in polyploidy, population genetics, and the development of novel algorithms and software for the analysis of molecular markers. I am currently a research specialist in the lab of Prof. Erik Sacks in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I study genetic and phenotypic diversity of Miscanthus, a perennial grass used for bioenergy and biomass, and have made discoveries about its evolutionary history in the wild and in cultivation.
How did you decide that the Data Bank was the best place to put the data?
The Data Bank is free, and it allows any type of data, which is great. [...] We liked that we could put essentially any information in there that we wanted, including the original handwritten field notes. Having that in the same repository as the genetic data, the phenotypes, the R scripts for data analysis - the paper explains everything from field observations to how to sequence the DNA. We have a broad range of data types all in one repository, which is great. I also really like the ability to link to other datasets; the raw DNA sequence data is many gigabytes and that's stored in NCBI, but we can put a link from this dataset back to NCBI as well.