Next-generation plant science: putting big data to work

摘要

A Report on the Plant Genomes & Biotechnology: From Genes to Networks meeting, held at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, USA, December 4–7, 2013. The introduction of next-generation sequencing has benefitted plant science due to a rapidly expanding number of fully sequenced and annotated plant genomes. The availability of genomic data has enabled researchers to go a step further and integrate big data from different kinds of -omics analyses to address fundamental questions. Over 120 participants gathered at the Plant Genomes & Biotechnology: From Genes to Networks meeting to discuss novel findings in diverse areas of plant biology using one or multiple -omics techniques. Overall, the speakers underlined the advantages of multi-omics tools exploring the diversity in physiological processes across plants, from model organisms and crops to carnivorous plants. While the multi-omics approach has many advantages, it could also present itself as overwhelming in both data quantity and complexity. Many talks presented at this meeting illustrated ways to approach big data to answer both general and detailed questions in plant biology. Indeed, it was evident that the questions that can be tackled using -omics approaches are vastly different from characterizing a single gene in a specific developmental or immune pathway. Rather, -omics approaches facilitate viewing and understanding particular biological processes as part of a larger enterprise: the whole plant and its connection with the environment. The meeting offered fresh insights from applying -omics to discovery, in the fields of abiotic and biotic stress response, epigenetics and genetics, hormone signaling, growth and development, biodiversity and adaptation to environment, and synthetic and network biology. Some of the most thought-provoking uses of multi-omics techniques presented at the conference are discussed below and include the characterization of intergenic regions, defining genes and pathways involved in specific processes, and measuring dynamic responses in tissues, whole plants or plant populations.