Genomics resources for plants

Abstract

Recently, genomics research in plants has offered considerable quantity of complex data which in turn has enhanced the development of specialized databases and analysis tools. The explosion in the growth of focused plant databases and tools is attributed to the advancement in the next-generation sequencing technology which has quickly generated enormous volumes of data at a reasonably low cost. These specialized plant databases cover varied types of information such as physical and genomic sequence maps, QTLs, loci and their several alleles, analysis tools, phenotypes, stocks, sequence information, and molecular markers. However, the main challenge to decipher this overflowing data for the improvement of crops is ever growing with an increase in the size as well as type of data. To address this issue, many new databases are constantly being developed with numerous analysis tools. The main purpose of these plant resources is to provide a single reserve for all the information that may be important for an individual or a group of species. Here, we review several of the extensively used genomics resources for plants, and we hope that this chapter will be of some help by serving as an initial point for people with research interests towards plant science.