Advances in plant and animal genomics promise to open thousands of new life science jobs in agriculture when the industry clears regulatory and cultural obstacles. With the potential to generate billions of dollars in economic activity, these advances are expected to trigger an increased demand for life scientists and researchers not only trained in classical laboratory techniques, but also skilled in bioinformatics and sequencing.
"Bioinformatics will be a major career area" for plant and animal genomics, says Caird Rexroad, acting associate administrator of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). "Folks in both public and private sectors are lining up to do some level of sequencing on most of the livestock genomes," he says. "So we'll continue to need people who understand data and how to mine it and how to put it into patterns that can match physiological and biochemical data."
But the commercial ...
