The First Databases Special Issue: The New Category Opens a New Portal to Plant and Cell Physiology. Plant Cell Physiol

I am very happy to announce the publication of our first Databases special issue, which features high-quality, informative articles on ‘Databases ’ that we have started publishing online during 2010. Back in 2010, we decided to launch this category with the main objectives of (i) expediting information sharing between researchers who only use bioinformatics and ‘traditional ’ re-searchers who study biological tissues; and (ii) providing discus-sion opportunities for bioinformatics research in plant science. Life science in recent years has been developed into ‘systems biology ’ research that integrates ‘omics ’ information from dif-ferent contexts, resulting in the emerging demands of the in-frastructure development of ‘omics ’ databases. In order to fulfill this demand, as well as streamlining high-quality web databases and continuing their operation and improvement, we must establish a collaboration structure between database develop-ers and many ‘traditional ’ researchers who use the databases. The existing database infrastructure development has generally been led by researchers who only use bioinformatics, and it does not sufficiently reflect the viewpoint of ‘traditional ’ re-searchers. On the other hand, ‘traditional ’ researchers as users of these databases have tended only to extract relevant infor-mation in a non-critical manner and have not communicated their opinions or demands about these databases to the devel-opers who are just at the other end of an online connection. With this in mind, this special issue includes seven articles on ‘Databases’, each of them fulfilling the above demands and all peer reviewed by the guest editors Takeshi Izawa, Takeshi Obayashi, Tetsuro Toyoda and Kentaro Yano. In the first article, Obayashi et al. report on ATTED-I