Bioinformatics Toolkit for Plant Studies

Dear Colleagues,

Advances in high-throughput technologies, including next-generation sequencing, have revolutionized the field of plant biology, similar to other life sciences fields. These developments were driven by remarkable advances in the field of bioinformatics. Similar to other disciplines, Big Data is becoming increasingly important in plant biology. A significant amount of omics data, including those of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, methylomics, interactomics, and phenomics, are now available in various databases across the globe, which has presented opportunities to interrogate these data and gain new insights into plants at the molecular, physiological, and systems levels. A number of bioinformatics tools have already been developed, with many more in the works, to analyze and interpret these data and facilitate a system-level understanding of the processes within plants. These include tools for identifying genes and characterizing their functions in plants; deciphering genotypes or genetic variations, as well as genome-wide associations, that underlie versatile phenotypes of plants; quantifying gene expression under different conditions including in response to biotic and abiotic stresses; elucidating protein–protein, protein–DNA, and protein–metabolite interactions; uncovering molecular networks and signaling mechanisms; and performing large-scale imaging data analysis to advance plant phenomics. Examining plant data at different levels using bioinformatics tools is enabling the development of next-generation technologies to engineer plants for a variety of purposes, including rendering them resilient to climatic changes and breeding crops for a sustainable planet. This Special Issue will highlight current and new bioinformatics tools, both standalone and pipeline based, for plant data analysis and interpretation.

Dr. Rajeev K. Azad
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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