This wealth of comprehensive online resources and web databases allows us to extract new essential biological information beyond what is gleaned from the dataset obtained from a single study. The large-scale data collected from web databases can be used to detect patterns such as consensus sequences of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) (e.g., Lazo et al. 2004;Lee et al. 2005;Lopez et al. 2004), global patterns of gene expression (Obayashi et al. 2007) and orthologous DNA and protein sequences among different genomes (Tatusov et al. 2003). To handle such large amounts of data effectively and efficiently, many new bioinformatics tools are under development. Here, we review the current state of web databases and bioinformatics tools available for plant research. The websites mentioned in this article are summarized in Table 1. Abstract Recently, high-throughput technologies for comprehensive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic analyses have been developed. Large-scale 'omics data' obtained from such experimental methods have rapidly accumulated and been stored into web databases. In addition, the number of web databases for molecular biology has rapidly increased, since most new projects construct and maintain new web databases for their own large-scale omics data. This wealth of comprehensive online resources and web databases allow us to extract essential new biological information beyond a dataset obtained from an individual study. For effective and efficient handling of such large sets of data, various kinds of bioinformatics tools are being developed. Here, we review the current state of web databases and bioinformatics tools for plant biosciences and systems biology.
Collections of databases, tools, and experimental materials