Bioinformatics Resources for Sustainable Agriculture

Abstract

Plant breeding and genetic engineering have made significant contributions in improving crops and thus addressing the problem of food security over the last few decades. However, due to continuously growing population, increasing urbanization, environmental pollution, land degradation, and global climate change, food security is still a major concern worldwide. More attention needs to be paid to sustainable crop production for ensuring enough food for current and future generations. Emergences of genomic technologies holds promise for improving crop productivity and provide solutions to the food shortage. Recent advances in high throughput technologies have led to generation of a tremendous amount of genomics data from plants that can be put to a variety of uses. Computational tools are essential to analyze this complex data generated from sequencing of genomes, determine complete set of genes, analyze transcripts and proteins encoded by an organism, and understand their interactions that bring out changes in phenotypes.