Worldwide, National Health Systems are investing to fit the requirements of “precision medicine.” This term refers to the prevention and treatment of diseases that take into account the individual characteristics of patients, from their genetic variability to their different life style. However, the aims of precision medicine can only be fully realized when the internal mechanisms of diseases are understood and a deep knowledge of their individual variability is reached. Such a high level of comprehension can not only allow physicians to maximize the benefit against dangerous side effects, but can also promote the discovery of new treatments and prevention procedures. The same attitude, which in medicine can be synthetized as a shift from pathologies to patients, can be applied in the field of agriculture, when general principles are adapted and regulated according to the specific environments and local situations where cultures are realized. These objectives require financial and intellectual resources to collect large amounts of genome and transcriptome data that are specifically related to the phenomena of interest in the different fields of applications (diseases in many contexts of related pathologies, or agricultural settings at the production level). However, a second methodological aspect is the powerful combination of information theoretical concepts with specific algorithmic and computational tools. This informational perspective is intended to extract deep biological meaning that often escape from simple statistical analyses of macroscopic phenomena. In fact, long range correlations or deep mathematical regularities, surprisingly enough, seem to relate with biological structures and functions that are encoded in a multilevel organization of genomes and of their expression. The search for new information-based categories will provide novel interpretation of classical biological concepts using this new informational approach. The results of this methodological innovation are going to have a wide range of applications in the public health and in many economic sectors that contribute positively to human lifestyle and to progress of countries. In particular, in the agri-food sector, the study of the variability of genomes and transcriptomes implies the improvement of productivity and quality of products. In this field the combination of plant biotechnology with bioinformatics, in comparison with the traditional techniques of phenotypic analysis of plants, will provide a remarkable increase of speed and efficiency in the selection of progenies with superior characteristics.

Editorial: New trends on genome and transcriptome characterizations

Giugno Rosalba
;
Vincenzo Manca
2018-01-01

Abstract

Worldwide, National Health Systems are investing to fit the requirements of “precision medicine.” This term refers to the prevention and treatment of diseases that take into account the individual characteristics of patients, from their genetic variability to their different life style. However, the aims of precision medicine can only be fully realized when the internal mechanisms of diseases are understood and a deep knowledge of their individual variability is reached. Such a high level of comprehension can not only allow physicians to maximize the benefit against dangerous side effects, but can also promote the discovery of new treatments and prevention procedures. The same attitude, which in medicine can be synthetized as a shift from pathologies to patients, can be applied in the field of agriculture, when general principles are adapted and regulated according to the specific environments and local situations where cultures are realized. These objectives require financial and intellectual resources to collect large amounts of genome and transcriptome data that are specifically related to the phenomena of interest in the different fields of applications (diseases in many contexts of related pathologies, or agricultural settings at the production level). However, a second methodological aspect is the powerful combination of information theoretical concepts with specific algorithmic and computational tools. This informational perspective is intended to extract deep biological meaning that often escape from simple statistical analyses of macroscopic phenomena. In fact, long range correlations or deep mathematical regularities, surprisingly enough, seem to relate with biological structures and functions that are encoded in a multilevel organization of genomes and of their expression. The search for new information-based categories will provide novel interpretation of classical biological concepts using this new informational approach. The results of this methodological innovation are going to have a wide range of applications in the public health and in many economic sectors that contribute positively to human lifestyle and to progress of countries. In particular, in the agri-food sector, the study of the variability of genomes and transcriptomes implies the improvement of productivity and quality of products. In this field the combination of plant biotechnology with bioinformatics, in comparison with the traditional techniques of phenotypic analysis of plants, will provide a remarkable increase of speed and efficiency in the selection of progenies with superior characteristics.
2018
Algorithms
Bioinformatics
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11562/986035
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