Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Plant Sciences

Technology advances in sequencing, imaging and robotics, has ended the “data drought”.  It is now possible to generate sequence based reference models and molecular phenotypes for any species. While these technologies have ended the drought, they have created other challenges associated with capture and utilization of the information that prevents the maximum insight that could be gained.  Now and in the future there will need to be a coordinated focus on standardization of data, including meta data such as experimental and environment information associated with genomic and phenotypic data sets, workflows to process and analyze the information, and mechanism to support access and interpretation of the data sets.   In this talk we will review both opportunities and challenges for data generators and end users.