Intended for plant biologists with vast amounts of field data to sort and understand, and also for computer scientists interested in the tools and systems available for plant research, this text presents 26 contributions from an international roster of researchers involved with the field as it applies to crops and model plants. Edwards (Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, U. of Queensland) sees a trend toward increasing integration of "related data drom different plants and also the integration of multiple diverse forms of data." He warns in his preface that readers will need to look for updates online in this rapidly evolving field. Coverage includes such tools as GenBank, UniProtKB, MIPS plant genome information resources, HarvEST, the TAIR database, AtEnsEMBL, Medicago.org, GrainGenes, SAGE, and KEGG Bionformatics, to name just a few. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)