[image: :seedling:] *What if the answer isn’t in a database—but in the
connections between databases?*
Join us on *Wednesday, October 7* for a webinar with Ehsan Estaji of the
Umeå Plant Science Centre, Sweden:
[image: :link:] Trapped knowledge in the AI-agent era: how PlantGraph turns
multi-database questions into one traversal you can check
PlantGraph connects plant data across the transcriptome, epigenome,
regulome, and proteome, helping researchers turn complex, multi-database
questions into one connected, traceable query.
As part of the monthly AgBioData Webinar Series
<https://www.agbiodata.org/webinars>, Ehsan will show how this approach can
help AI agents retrieve evidence more reliably—and how we can check whether
AI-generated answers actually stay grounded in that evidence.
Wednesday, October 7
| 1P ET | 12P CT | 11A MT | 10A PT |
Find your local time here
<https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=AgBioData+Oct+202…>
.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82038356125?pwd=YVFMRElMdEpHZmtObXFvZlA4QVFXQT09
Meeting ID: 820 3835 6125
Passcode: 160683
Title: Trapped knowledge in the AI-agent era: how PlantGraph turns
multi-database questions into one traversal you can check
Abstract: A real biological question is rarely a record — it is a path.
“Which salt-responsive genes also carry a promoter methylation change, a
transcription-factor binding site, and a known phosphosite?” has no home
database: the answer exists only as a traversal across four of them. This
is why so much of what we collectively know sits trapped. Not because the
facts are missing — they are curated, somewhere — but because the
connections between them were never stored anywhere. Researchers rebuild
those connections by hand, one question at a time, and lose them the moment
they close the tabs.
Capable AI agents raise the cost of that fragmentation rather than
resolving it. An agent handed a set of endpoints has to plan the join
itself, guessing identifiers and directions at every hop, and every hop is
an opportunity to improvise. In our own benchmarking, giving a strong model
tools and API access over fragmented sources did not reliably fix
retrieval; connecting the data first, and retrieving over it
deterministically, did.
PlantGraph (plantgraph.se) integrates community plant resources into one
connected knowledge graph and separates two jobs that agents usually
conflate: the graph retrieves the evidence, the language model only writes
over it. A multi-database question becomes a single traversal — and because
that traversal actually ran, every claim can be followed back to the query
that produced it and the source record that curated it.
I will walk through questions spanning transcriptome, epigenome, regulome
and proteome resolving in one step, how we measure when the generated
narration drifts from the retrieved evidence, and where the approach still
fails. PlantGraph <https://plantgraph.se/> is not a replacement for the
databases it draws on — it stands on them, and every resource that connects
makes the rest worth more.
See also this news blog <https://www.agbiodata.org/node/652>.
Marcela
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Marcela Karey Tello-Ruiz, PhD
AgBioData Program Manager
https://www.agbiodata.org/
Phoenix Bioinformatics