Clear way ahead for leaf research

Databases (collections of information that are organised ‘so that it can easily be accessed, managed, and updated’) are everywhere these days and, as repositories of data that can be explored by interested parties – and maybe new connections made and insights revealed – they are an extremely useful resource for science. Indeed, access to large data sets is so important to modern-day scientific endeavour that a new journal has recently been established to publish the outcome of such studies. Scientific Data is an open-access, online-only publication for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets that exists to help you publish, discover and reuse research data and will ‘complement and promote public data repositories’. And in the tradition of science belonging to us all, the journal’s primary article type, the ‘Data Descriptor’, is designed to make your data more discoverable, interpretable and reusable. However, for such journals to achieve their noble and philanthropic aims, the necessary databases of ‘stuff’ need to exist – or be created. One such facility whose birth caught my eye(!) recently was the ClearedLeavesDB, an online database of cleared plant leaf images – its existence and purpose has been highlighted by Abhiram Das et al., who developed it. Leaf vein networks (LVNs) are important to both the structure and function of leaves and there is a growing body of work linking LVN structure to the physiology, ecology and evolution of land plants. Recognising the importance of LVNs, the team developed this digital archive that enables online viewing, sharing and disseminating of collections of images of cleared leaves (which usually have the LVNs enhanced) held by both institutions and individual researchers. We applaud this initiative and trust that its objectives – to facilitate research advances in the study of leaf structure and function, to preserve and archive cleared leaf data in an electronic, accessible format, and to promote the exchange of new data and ideas for the plant biology community – are met.