Additional reading sources for the recent advancements on ‘omics’ sciences

Additional reading sources for the recent advancements on ‘omics’ sciences

It is not a secret that current food deficiency could be even more evident with a global human population increase and current global climate changes with increased biosecurity threats in the era of the societal globalization and advances of technologies in the 21st century and beyond. There are needs to find better ways and solutions to mitigate the future challenges, which require enrichment and change of methodologies, technologies, and scientific views of the past. Here comes “omics” sciences– a newly evolved discipline in biomedical sciences. Its development and advances tightly interconnected with life science sub-disciplines such as genomics, biotechnology, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, phenomics, metagenomics, transgenomics, breeding-assisted genomics, bioinformatics, and system biology as well as modern instrumentation and robotics sciences. Aiming to develop genome-wide scaled high-throughput technologies and methodologies for life sciences research and application, “omics” directions have significantly advanced over the past three decades in the land of inexpensive, high-throughput, and automated new

generation DNA sequencing methodologies and platforms. For example, according to the listings in the Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD) as of 2016 there were 79, 650 genome sequencing projects of which 8,018 were completed projects, 33, 489 were permanent drafts, 35, 609 were incomplete projects, and 1,553 were targeted projects. There are 73,000 organism including archaea (1,201), bacteria (55,303), eukaryotes (11,990), and viruses (4,473) listed for sequencing. Among these, a sequencing of the 100, 000 whole-human genomes has been successfully finished. Advances in omics directions resulted also in decoding of more than 100 plant genomes of 64 megabases to 23 gigabases in lengths within past 10 years. Increasing body of our knowledge on a sequence/gene of interest has provided opportunity to manipulate genetic sequences using organism’s own gene or gene fragments, making novel biotechnologies advantageous over existing gene manipulation “transgenic” approaches. These advances made have broad implications for every aspects of modern biology while generating many unexpected challenges and grand tasks ahead.
       Addressing all of these advancements on past decade “omics” research and application as well as needed tasks ahead InTech Open, under editorship of Prof. Ibrokhim Y. Abdurakhmonov, Center of Genomics and Bioinformatics, Uzbekistan, recently has published three edited volumes entitled «RNA interference» (http://www.intechopen.com/books/rna-interference; published on April 6, 2016; so far downloaded for 3, 500 times) «Plant genomics» (http://www.intechopen.com/books/plant-genomics published on July 14, 2016; so far downloaded for over 1000 times), and «Bioinformatics: Updated Features and Applications» (http://www.intechopen.com/books/bioinformatics-updated-features-and-applications; published on July 27, 2016; so far downloaded for 733 times)
     Reviewing «Bioinformatics: Updated Features and Applications», Prof. Gilbert S. Omenn, Director, Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, Professor of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, Internal Medicine, Human Genetics and Public Health, University of Michigan, USA quoted that “This book addresses an unusually wide range of features and applications of the rapidly expanding new scientific field of bioinformatics. The perspective from a developing country and the focus on agricultural genomics are particularly noteworthy” – quotes Prof. Gilbert S. Omenn, Director, Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, Professor of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, Internal Medicine, Human Genetics and Public Health, University of Michigan, USA.
     These open access book volumes, highly accessed worldwide researchers, have provided updated discussions on current advances, challenges, and future perspectives of “omics” research and application, which should be additional reading sources for scientist, students and readers interested with the plant sciences development.