An overview of advances in plant genomics in the new millennium

The technologies available for genomics have continued to develop rapidly since 2000 accelerating their application to plant biology and plant breeding. These technologies are providing the tools to allow the cost effective collection of much larger volumes of data on plant genomes. This is in turn requiring the development of bioinformatics capabilities to analyse this data and apply it successfully in plant improvement. Genomics in a general sense is advancing by improvements in technology at each of the levels from studies of DNA (genomics) and RNA (transcriptomics) which is often considered a core part of genomics, to proteins (proteomics), metabolites (metabolomics) and the phenotypes (phenomics) (Fig. 1).