Bioinformatics Tools to Assist Breeding for Climate Change

Major advances have been made in the various “omics” fields in recent years, driven by new genomics technology, particularly DNA sequencing and high-throughput genotyping. The ability to interrogate the genome of diverse organisms enables the characterization of allelic variants underlying important agronomic traits. Advances in bioinformatics support the analysis of the genomic data flood, and applied genome informatics has grown rapidly over recent years in parallel with the expansion of genomics. As we face the perfect storm of increasing population and increasing climatic variation, advances in genomics, phenomics and related research, supported by bioinformatics, offer the greatest potential for accelerating food production and sustainability. An increasing number of crop genomes are being sequenced, and large-scale diversity studies, performed at the whole genome level, are being undertaken for the major crops. The analysis of this data is facilitated by customized databases, statistical methods and visualization tools. Through the integration and interrogation of the various “omics” data and the application of these resources for crop improvement, we have the potential to maintain and improve food security during a period of increasing climate variability.