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Nancy A. Eckardt, Malcolm Bennett, In Silico Plant Biology Comes of Age, The Plant Cell, Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2012, Pages 3857–3858, https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.112.241011
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Plants are complex, multicellular organisms whose growth and development responds to a plethora of intrinsic and environmental signals. Over the last several decades, molecular genetics has provided a highly effective means to dissect this complexity and pinpoint key regulatory genes and signals that control plant growth and development. However, the advent of genomic technologies has revealed that plant cells and tissues contain many thousands of molecular components that interact to form gene regulatory networks and biochemical complexes, which control organ growth and development. Researchers are currently challenged with making sense of the avalanche of -omics information about these components and their relationships. Systems biology provides a means to analyze these complex data sets and reveal new biological insights.
In this issue, four invited reviews describe how systems biology approaches are being used by plant researchers to generate mechanistic insights that span from genomic to cellular scales. Bassel et al. (pages 3859–3875) describe how high-throughput -omics approaches are being used to construct genome-scale plant regulatory networks. The authors review the generation of coexpression networks, mapping, and analysis of large-scale gene regulatory and metabolic networks and the protein interactome.
