GallOnt: An ontology for plant gall phenotypes

Galls are novel plant structures that develop in response to select biotic stressors. These structures, extended phenotypes of the inducer, usually serve to protect and feed the inducer or its progeny. This life history strategy has evolved dozens of times, and tens of thousands of species - including many bacteria, fungi, nematodes, mites and insects - are capable of manipulating plants in this way. The variation in gall phenotypes is extraordinary across species but usually predictable for each species of inducer. We introduce here a new ontology, GallOnt, that facilitates consistent descriptions and the semantic representation of and reasoning over plant gall phenotype data. GallOnt was largely developed from ontologies in the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and stands to connect plant gall phenotypes to knowledge derived from model plant systems, including genotype-phenotype and agricultural research. We also introduce the idea of a new gall data standard - Minimum Information for the Description of Galls (MIDG version 0.1) - as a starting point for discussions regarding cecidology best practices.