Postgenomic Challenges in Plant Bioinformatics

There are more than 250,000 species of plants. They represent a wide variety of growth habits, adaptive responses, and useful traits. Plant genomics and post-genomics studies are expected to provide an unprecedented enhancement of our understanding of the biological events during plant growth, development and interactions with environmental factors. Plant diversity and complexity provide the opportunity to study about the similarities and differences among organisms and the basis of ecologic adaptations while taking advantage of large collections of cultivars and wild relatives with diverse life forms

Post-genomics approaches for plant biology studies include powerful techniques such as reverse genetics approaches involving genome-scale knockout mutations and, especially, T-DNA insertion mutants that have become a valuable resource for the study of gene function in Arabidopsis (Tax and Vernon, 2001; Thorneycroft et al., 2001). In addition, proteomics studies are being performed using protein microarrays for the detection of immobilized antigen with antibodies or vice versa (reviewed by Kersten et al., 2002), and metabolomics studies, aiming to examine the set of metabolites synthesized by a biological system (reviewed by Fiehn, 2002) are being integrated.

Facilitating plant genomics research is the combination of efficient of high throughput transformation systems, short generation times and high proliferation rates. Integrated genomics studies are likely to reinforce the ability not only to select the candidate genes most suitable for manipulation, in order to enhance or reduce biological processes, but also to provide a better and precise prediction of the outcome of such manipulation. The genetic pathways that typify a “plant” will be understood. Therefore, the influence of manipulation of one or more components of a certain signaling pathway, on other pathways that converge with the manipulated one, may be better predicted.