Explore the possibility of unifying OBA and TO, and uPheno

[matentzn]

The plant trait ontology TO is the conceptual counterpart of OBA, but it contains (or will soon contain, as per @diatomsRcool) some phenotypey terms now, like blue colour leaves or increased leaf size.

@marieALaporte we have been talking about this for ages, but maybe its time to try some careful alignments? I see the following issues to bridge:

• plant and metazoan anatomy is widely disconnected (I mean not only biologically but ontologies as well), so probably cellular and sub-cellular alignment most relevant
• Our "phenotypes" i.e. the things that are actually changed (increased, decreased, abnormal, etc etc) have the "has part" buffer prepended to it

Is there any strong cross-species use case that is strong enough to justify a bit of alignment on?

[diatomsRcool]

When I think of phenotypes that could be universal, I think mostly of biomass, height, color, etc. So for use cases that would use these phenotypes... can we make an argument from the perspective of ecology, like some sort of island effect on size? Altitude/depth effect on color? Maybe something from transgenics where an animal gene has both an animal and a plant phenotype?