The medical uses are obvious, mostly focused on the detection and treatment of diseases. Applied and basic research into plant, microorganisms and animals may lead to products or more complete basic understanding of biology and ecology. While work to unravel the mysteries in bacteria, some small multi-celled organisms, plants and the human genome project has been going on for some time, applications for environmental uses of genomics are relatively new. In the agricultural area, several crops are being researched including cacao and rice. When completed, rice will be the second largest genome to be completely sequenced.
Rice shares common sets of genes with most of the world's major food crops.
The relatively small size of the rice genome makes it an ideal model for understanding other major grass crops including corn, wheat, rye, barley, sorghum, sugarcane, and millet. Such projects will provide insight into how diseases affect crop plants, sites that code for specific traits, how plants interrelate with the environment amongst other items. Some of this information would provide ideas on how to breed plants with new traits. The following text is provided as a starting point for discussion. Intellectual property rights are even at present inhibiting sharing of scientific information.