Applications of bioinformatics in plant and agriculture

Abstract

The high-throughput technologies generating large-scale biological data, as well as the development of related computational tools, have united global efforts and brought revolutionary changes to the research of biology during the last decade. Today, biologists work in association with scientists from a broad spectrum of disciplines to unravel how complex biological systems work. Bioinformatics is a multidisciplinary field that makes use of computers to store and analyse molecular biology information with integration of statistical algorithms. The genome sequencing of a number of organisms has led to the discovery of many fascinating things. Today, the world feels the need of this discipline to save resources and time. This chapter emphasises on a number of applications of bioinformatics in agriculture in view of functional genomics, data mining techniques, genome-wide association studies, high-performance computing facilities in agriculture and various bioinformatics tools/databases important for breeders, biotechnologists and pathologists. Agricultural genomics leads to the global understanding of plant/animal and pathogen biology, and its application would be beneficial for agriculture.