Positioning Arabidopsis in plant biology. A key step toward unification of plant research.

One of the major challenges in biological investigation involves developing a robust predictive framework in which biological outputs can be predicted from input data and knowledge of the state of the system. Currently, genomics-based strategies provide a strong framework for integrating biological knowledge within a species and linking knowledge between diverse organisms, as DNA sequence is a durable, accurate, and complete record of biological information. As such, it provides the best source of information upon which predictive rules can start to be built, tested, and generalized. Generalization is a key component of predictive biology because it defines the extent to which we can accurately predict from one instance to another. In plant science, several important research themes are concerned with generalization, and progress in these areas is reviewed here. The importance of developing a framework for predictive biology that includes a much wider variety of plant species is also emphasized.