The narrow genetic basis of many crops combined with restrictions on the commercial use of genetically modified plants, has led to a surge of interest in exploring natural biodiversity as a source of novel alleles to improve the productivity, adaptation, quality and nutritional value of crops. Genetic methodologies have been applied to natural variation to improve quality aspects that are assoc...

This paper questions the utility of the ethical principles that are usually invoked to deal with genomic issues, particularly genetic databases. Concepts such as solidarity, benefit sharing, equity, public participation, and collective identity are discussed. The author argues that genetic banks are precipitating new concern over group interest, as opposed to concern over issues arising from in...

The Pseudomonas syringae phylogenetic group comprises 15 recognized bacterial species and more than 60 pathovars. The classification and identification of strains is relevant for practical reasons but also for understanding the epidemiology and ecology of this group of plant pathogenic bacteria. Genome-based taxonomic analyses have been introduced recently to clarify the taxonomy of the whole g...

stem cell factor (scf) is a critical protein with key roles in the cell such as hematopoiesis, gametogenesis and melanogenesis. in the present study a comparative analysis on nucleotide sequences of scf was performed in humanoids using bioinformatics tools including ncbi-blast, mega6, and jbrowse. our analysis of nucleotide sequences to find closely evolved organisms with high similarity by ncb...

personalized medicine is significantly changing the fundamentals of healthcare. genetic diagnostic tests are used in various parts of medicine – from initial screening to the diagnosis and finally treatment. investigations in fields of drug development indicate that oncology may lead other therapeutic areas in the number of targeted therapies on the marketplace as well as in the pipeline, expec...

A grand challenge in genome science of the 21 century is to computationally predict systemic functional behaviors of the cell, organism, and the ecosystem from genomics and molecular information, especially for the purpose of medical, industrial, and other practical applications. This will require new bioinformatics, not simply for screening the large-scale data, but rather for reconstructing t...

UNLABELLED Public genomic databases, which are often used to guide genetic studies of human disease, are now being applied to genomic medicine through in silico integrative genomics. These databases, however, often lack tools for systematically determining the experimental origins of the data. RESULTS We introduce a new data provenance model that we have implemented in a public web applicatio...

We review the anticipated needs of the plant genome research community for long-lived data collections. We find that there is an increasing need for such repositories, and offer guidelines for balancing the funding of data production projects with those aimed to manage and integrate the data. In particular, we find that there is a pressing need to develop a trained cadre of skilled knowledge wo...

Metabolomics has grown greatly as a functional genomics tool, and has become an invaluable diagnostic tool for biochemical phenotyping of biological systems. Over the past decades, a number of databases involving information related to mass spectra, compound names and structures, statistical/mathematical models and metabolic pathways, and metabolite profile data have been developed. Such databa...

The Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) (www.plantontology.org) is a collaborative effort among several plant databases and experts in plant systematics, botany and genomics. A primary goal of the POC is to develop simple yet robust and extensible controlled vocabularies that accurately reflect the biology of plant structures and developmental stages. These provide a network of vocabularies linked ...