The fruits of tropical plant genomics

Abstract

The richness of tropical biodiversity offers a corresponding wealth of opportunity for the application of genomic research strategies and technologies to address fundamental questions in agriculture, ecology, evolution, and medicine. Herein, we explore a tiny sampling of these opportunities in five taxa of special promise, foreshadowing a few possible outcomes of invigorated research into tropical plant biology. These and other equally attractive candidates for new research vary widely in the tools presently available for their study. However, technological progress sets the stage for choosing organisms for study based more heavily on their intrinsic ecological or evolutionary interest, reducing the need that they be facile for genomics.