Evolution and applications of plant pathway resources and databases

Plants are important sources of food and plant products are essential for modern human life. Plants are increasingly gaining importance as drug and fuel resources, bioremediation tools and as tools for recombinant technology. Considering these applications, database infrastructure for plant model systems deserves much more attention. Study of plant biological pathways, the interconnection between these pathways and plant systems biology on the whole has in general lagged behind human systems biology. In this article we review plant pathway databases and the resources that are currently available. We lay out trends and challenges in the ongoing efforts to integrate plant pathway databases and the applications of database integration. We also discuss how progress in non-plant communities can serve as an example for the improvement of the plant pathway database landscape and thereby allow quantitative modeling of plant biosystems. We propose Good Database Practice as a possible model for collaboration and to ease future integration efforts.