Plant developmental genetics: Integrating data from different experiments in databases

Abstract

Plant developmental genetics as a scientific discipline integrates data from such different fields of biology as embryology, plant anatomy, molecular biology and genetics, and studies their interactions in the course of plant development. To date, traditional publication of scientific studies in articles is supplemented by presenting in databases the data generated by high-throughoutput methods in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and phenomics. The information burst, caused both by genome-scale research projects and growth in the number of articles, requires the development of general standards of annotating data from different sources for their integration and comparison. In this review, we present classification and analysis of existing databases, in which the user can find various data on plant developmental genetics, and discuss problems of these data integration both within informational resources and among them.