Progress in science depends on both new ideas and new methodologies. Throughout the years, the pages of both Plant Physiology and THE PLANT CELL have contained ample evidence that major technological advances enable us to deepen our understanding of how plants develop and function. The advent of molecular tools and their combination with more classical genetic and biochemical approaches have allowed us to gain new insights into many previously intractable questions that had preoccupied plant biologists for years. Processes such as flowering, seed and embryo development, plant-microbe interactions, protein trafficking, inter- and intracellular signaling, ion uptake and transport, photosynthate partitioning, and adaptation to environmental stress are all yielding their secrets. As a result of these discoveries, we now think along completely new lines about plant development (i.e. combinatorial control by transcription factors), a plant's interaction with its environment (i.e. signal transduction cascades), and crop improvement (i.e. transgenic plants). These novel ideas have greatly enriched our discipline.

With the recent emergence of genomics as a major new discipline within biology, we are on the verge of another technological revolution that will create its own original paradigms and further change the way we approach questions about how plants develop and function. The rapidly evolving tools of genomics include information about the genome itself (i.e. gene sequences, their relation to genetic maps, and comparisons to related plant groups); microarrays of DNAs that have been obtained from large collections of mutant plants (generated by chemical, physical, or insertional mutagens) and/or from plants that have been subjected to various treatments; and chips on which DNA fragments or oligonucleotides representing thousands of geneseven whole genomeshave been immobilized. Relational databases that can store the enormous amounts of information about gene products and their expression profiles that can be generated with these tools, as well as profiles of protein modifications and small metabolites, are becoming readily available. All of these efforts are being supported by powerful software that will allow all of us to obtain a comprehensive viewfrom gene to developmental decision or metabolic pathwayof the metabolic and genetic repertoire that is being played out in any cell, tissue, or organ at any point in the life cycle of any plant under any condition.

Genome-wide comprehensive approaches such as these, in which information concerning 20,000 genes and/or their products can be analyzed simultaneously, are likely to offer us insights into plant form and function that we can only begin to imagine. New targets for exploitation in the commercial markets are also likely to be identified using these approaches.

But how will all this information be distilled and presented to the entire plant science community? Clearly, both Plant Physiology and THE PLANT CELL are well positioned to play major roles in this genomic revolution. Papers that include genomic approaches can be submitted to either journal. For Plant Physiology, Vicki Chandler, the associate editor for the section on Molecular Genetics and Genomics, will ensure that these papers are reviewed and given a decision by a member of the editorial board. As always, the decision to publish these papers will be based primarily on whether the data and the conclusions drawn from them offer novel insights into plant form and function.

To those who seek a full and clear explanation of genomics and to those who plan to teach about genomics, I refer you to the Update on Genomics by David Bouchez and Herman Höfte in this issue of Plant Physiology (Vol. 118, No. 3, pp. 725-732; www.plantphysiology.org). The article explains, in terms that every plant biologist can understand, what genomics is, what the tools are, and how they will be used to understand plants. Also, THE PLANT CELL is preparing a forthcoming Special Issue on the topic of genomics, and a version of this editorial also appears in the November issue of THE PLANT CELL (Vol. 10, No. 11, p. 1771; www.plantcell.org).

In addition to the important role that genome sequencing and informatics serve, the true function of genes will not be discovered in silico by sequence gazers but by biologists in the laboratory and in the field. The genomic era promises to be one in which major new understandings of plant biology will emerge, and we look forward to it with anticipation.