The vast quantities of diverse biological data generated by recent biotechnological advances have led to the development and evolution of the field of bioinformatics. This relatively new field facilitates both the analysis of genomic and postgenomic data and the integration of information from the related fields of transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics. Such integration enables the identification of genes and gene products, and can elucidate the functional relationships between genotype and observed phenotype, thereby permitting a system-wide analysis from genome to phenome. With the increasing value and throughput of plant biotechnology, bioinformatics is being called on to integrate the varied data generated by the expanding '-omic' technologies. Copyright © 2004 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.