A Role of Bioinformatics in Agriculture

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary science emerging from interaction of computer, statistics, biology and mathematics to analyze genome arrangement and contents, biological sequence data, predict the structure and function of macromolecules that use in interpreting and decoding plant genome. The broad amounts of data produced in life sciences resulted to the evolution and development of bioinformatics. Omics, bioinformatics and computational tools are very essential to understand genomics and the molecular systems that underlie several plant functions. Various new omic layers such as genome, hormonome, metabalome, interactome, and epigenome analysis have emerged by technological advances. Such integration of information enables and facilitates the identification of expression of gene which helps to interpret the relationship between phenotype and genotype, thus approving from genome to phenome system-wide analysis. Earlier biological research that used laboratories, plant clinics and field is now at In-silico or computers level (Computational). Bioinformatics develops software, algorithms, databases and tools of data analysis to make discoveries and infer the information. Application of various bioinformatics tools and databases enable analysis, storage, annotation, visualization and retrieval of outcomes to helps enhanced understanding in living system research. Thus it will help to improve the plant quality based on health care disease diagnosis. In this chapter we describe the bioinformatics approaches (databases and tools) in plant science and implication of next generation sequencing technology (NGS) on crop genetics.