ABSTRACT
Lederberg and McGray (2001) traced the origin of the term “Genomics” to the foundation of the journal with same name in 1977. Whereas the initial focus was on mapping and sequencing of genomes, todays definitions are broader. Besides exploring the structure of complete genomes (structural genomics), genomics strives to study the function of all genes in an organism (functional genomics) in a multiparallel manner (Lander 1996). An essential component of current genomics projects is the use of tools allowing massively parallel studies of several or all genes of an organism such as microarrays for transcriptome expression profiling experiments. Moreover, the close phylogenetic relationships of species and their genomes within systematic families led to the development of both comparative genomic approaches and the model species concept. The underlying idea is that species with small genomes such as Arabidopsis thaliana and rice in plants can be more easily addressed by expensive structural and functional genomics approaches. Information gathered in model species can then be transferred to related species by use of syntenic relationships of their genomes (Devos 2005), both for hypothesis-driven research or application in crop species. However, with the advent of new sequencing technologies (e.g., FLX and Solexa) and progress in genomic tool development, genomic tools and information
Thomas Lübberstedt* and Madan K. Bhattacharyya
Iowa State University, Department of Agronomy,
Agronomy Hall, 50011-1010 Ames, IA, USA
*Corresponding author: thomasl@iastate.edu
(such as completely sequenced genomes) have become increasingly available in all major crop species (e.g, https://www.jgi. doe.gov/genom projects/pages/projects.jsf?taxonomy=Eukaryote%2C+Large). Depending on the definition, genomics includes epigenomics, computational genomics, proteomics, structural genomics for protein structures and metabolomics, which will not be specifically discussed below.
