Yonsei Biotechnology Professor Lee In-suk and his research team have recently published two articles on crop systems genetics using network approaches.

The first article, “Network-assisted crop systems genetics: network inference and integrative analysis,” was published April 1 in Current Opinion in Plant Biology, a prestigious review journal dedicated to major recent advances in the field. For this issue of the journal, Professor Lee served as guest editor along with Dr. Todd Mockler from the Danforth Plant Research Center in the United States. Together, they edited sixteen review articles related to the issue’s theme, which was “Data-driven approaches to genotype-to-phenotype studies in crops.” These articles, which include Professor Lee’s, cover recent advances related to the crop genome project, plant system genomics using next generation sequencing, functional genomics, and bio-information system technology.

The second article, “RiceNet v2: an improved network prioritization server for rice genes,” was published March 26 in the online version of Nucleic Acids Research, a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press. Here, Professor Lee and his coauthors present their updated genome-scale functional network server called RiceNet v2 (www.inetbio.org/ricenet). This server provides a network of almost 26,000 genes, along with 1,775,000 co-functional links. According to the authors, RiceNet v2 represents a significant increase in the amount of publicly available rice genomics data, and it should be of great value to researchers in the field throughout the world.