DataPLANT

DataPLANT is a German research-data infrastructure initiative that develops open-source tooling for the plant-science community, with its single public Windows package, ArcCommander, acting as a desktop control center for the Annotated Research Context (ARC) framework. The software lets biologists, bioinformaticians and data stewards create, validate, version-synchronize and share ARCs—self-contained folder structures that package experimental protocols, raw instrument files, processed datasets, code and metadata according to the FAIR and DataPLANT standards. Typical use cases range from initializing a new Arabidopsis phenotyping project, through registering multi-omics data in a local Git-backed registry, to bundling an entire investigation for publication or submission to repositories such as Zenodo or the European Nucleotide Archive. ArcCommander therefore sits at the intersection of electronic lab notebook, data-management plan executor and git client, giving laboratories a lightweight alternative to heavy institutional repositories while still enforcing machine-readable metadata and persistent identifiers. Users can annotate assays with ISA-tab templates, assign uniform identifiers, trigger continuous-validation workflows and push snapshots to remote branches for collaboration. Because the tool is built on .NET 6 and exposes both a CLI and a graphical wizard, it integrates equally well into automated pipelines and into the routine desktop work of researchers who need a quick way to structure their folders before the next sequencing run. DataPLANT’s software is available for free on get.nero.com, where ArcCommander is delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always installs the newest release and can be pulled in batch alongside any other applications.