Bioinformatics for Crop Improvement and Agricultural Development: Lecture Note

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to manage biological data that helps in decoding plant & animal genomes.. The research challenge in the post-genome era is to establish how genes and proteins function to bring about changes in phenotype. The greatest ultimate impact will be in agricultural genomics, especially for marker assisted selection and breeding programs in crop and animal agriculture, development of animal disease diagnostics and vaccines, crop genetic engineering to overcome abiotic and biotic stresses and for improvement of the nutritional quality of major food staples. Application of various bioinformatics tools in biological research enables storage, retrieval, analysis, annotation and visualization of results and promotes better understanding of biological system. Bioinformatics platforms and their associated databases are also essential for the effective design of approaches making the best use of genomic resources, This will help in plant health care based disease diagnosis to improve the quality of Plant.