Omics databases in plant science: key to systems biology

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.