ABSTRACT
Technology advances have resulted in an explosion of biological data that requires organization and analysis before it can facilitate further research and deliver benefits. Bioinformatics seeks to classify this data and present it
for ease of use or to develop tools that allow additional exploitation of the data by discovering links that were not previously apparent. For many species, both plant and animal, extraordinary resources in the form of a genome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome are often available. In addition, there may be DNA marker-rich genetic maps and populations of individuals that have been scored for a variety of traits of either scientific or economic interest. Genetically altered stocks displaying known phenotypes may also have been generated. This array of information had previously only been generated for model organisms, e.g. Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, Mus musculus, Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa (Issel-Tarver et al. 2002; Chen et al. 2005; Ouyang et al. 2007; Bult et al. 2008; Swarbreck et al. 2008; Keseler et al. 2009; Tweedie et al. 2009), but is now starting to be created for non-model species including several economically important crop species, e.g. wheat, barley, sorghum and sugarcane.
