Editorial: Plant and Cell Physiology’s 2015 Database Issue

org/content/56/1.toc). As with past issues (Matsuoka 2011, Obayashi and Yano 2013, Obayashi and Yano 2014), this year we aim to provide a valuable online resource and forum for the discussion of bioinformatics, novel approaches, and on-line tools to help handle and analyze large biological datasets available for plant research. Databases serve as a useful infra-structure upon which to base scientific advances in wet and dry lab research as well as bioinformatics. Further, the growing suc-cess of PCP’s database issues and the many participants for the ‘database sessions ’ held at the annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists and at genomics conferences world-wide prove their remarkable popularity and the increas-ing necessity to store large-scale biological datasets in databases. Today, an overwhelming amount of information o