Digital Phenome

An ambitious decadal goal of the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory (EMSL) is to develop a digital phenome platform (DigiPhen) where users generate a variety of data types and use those data to parameterize computational simulation and modeling tools to predict the behavior or phenotypes of a biological system of interest. Learn how to become a scientific partner. 

DigiPhen will encompass experimental and analytical workflows supporting a digital representation of the functional basis of a phenotype for whole microbial or plant systems, as well as an expanding set of interchangeable, interconnecting modules that contain data and models representing the mechanistic determinants of a phenotype. 

DigiPhen is a platform that grows American scientific leadership in data production and data–model integration across structural biology, biomolecular pathways, and cellular signaling and communication, linking the molecular basis of function to observable or desirable phenotypes.  Molecular, structural, and functional data from EMSL, along with data from EMSL partner and collaborator analytical platforms, constitute DigiPhen’s data modules. These modules inform connected mechanistic models of function, developed at EMSL by users or by researchers and organizations associated with EMSL. When fully deployed, DigiPhen will provide the user community with a massive and continually growing stream of well-curated AI-ready multimodal phenotyping data and numeric or simulation models for accurately and expediently annotating biological function across species and taxa for Biological and Environmental Research (BER)-program-relevant microbial and plant systems.