• Investigate how plants develop means to fight off infection.
• Identify the specific genetic makeup of diseases that attack livestock.
• Focus on the genomics involved in the interaction between mosquitoes, the pathogens that cause malaria and the animal host for the disease.
• Knowledge discovered in these areas could be used to develop treatments for costly diseases or develop techniques to equip plants with natural disease resistance.

• Friendly microbes help legume plants produce their own nitrogen, work in human intestines to break down food, and eliminate toxins in soil.
• Genomic research will provide tools to make use of these abilities.
• This could lead to maximizing the healthy benefits of the bacteria in yogurt, reducing the need for plant fertilizers, or developing methods for cleaning up contaminated soil.
•  In addition, other researchers are looking at genomic information that could lead to producing antibiotics, biodegradable plastics, natural product chemicals and other useful products.

Developing basic research tools

• Each DNA strand stores millions of pieces of data, and analyzing that requires a lot of computer power and sophisticated programs. Researchers use DNA chips, or microarray technology (slides that show activity of all genes within a genome), to study the activity of a large number of genes (when genes are switched on or off).
• Gene shuffling assembles groups of genes to produce novel compounds that could be used in medicine or industry.
• High throughput screening technology will sort through large numbers of cells, genes, plants, microbes or compounds to find those that have useful characteristics or properties that can be applied to crop improvement, environmental clean-up, or human health.

Ethics and Economic Impact

• Impacts of new genomic discoveries on society.
• Agricultural and environmental ethics and policy issues.
• Economics of science and technology.
• Impacts of biotechnology on public policy.