https://phys.org/news/2018-10-whole-system-view-cold-stress.html

"The chances are slim that breeders could successfully modify a single gene and achieve greater cold tolerance. We need to understand the entire system: not only the gene of interest but all the related genes that affect particular pathways and other biological activities involved in a plant's stress response," says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I and an author on the Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology study. "Our study identifies significant metabolites associated with important traits and is a step forward in metabolic profiling techniques."

Next-generation gene sequencing made it possible to generate lists of all the genes and proteins being expressed at a given moment within an organism—constituting millions of data points—but there was still no way of understanding what they all were or how they were interacting.