Bioinformatics:Genomicsto Phenomics and Beyond

The commentary ‘Bioinformatics: how it helps to boost modern biological re-search’¹ aptly summarizes how modern bioinformatics has moved from simple mapping and sequencing to the era of functional genomics. We would like to supplement new and exciting develop-ments which may result in an overall paradigm shift in bioinformatics and re-lated in silico data domains. First, it is to be appreciated that plant phenotyping, a relatively novel field, involves high-throughput plant phenomic platforms that accurately measure trait values and varia-bility across crop genotypes² . A dialogue of phenomics with genomics (and vice versa) seems to be operative ushering in a big-data era that shall see a synthesis of traditional omics (genomics, transcrip-tomics, metabolomics) and phenomics as never before^2,3 .