There can be no better time to be a scientist.   I do basic research on the biology of oomycete pathogens and high quality sequence information is available for four of these pathogens http://annuminas.vbi.vt.edu/.   Additional genomes http://pythium.plantbiology.msu.edu/ are also in the pipeline. Oomycetes have a very interesting evolutionary history.  As someone who also teaches genetics, it has been particularly rewarding to look at some of the novel genetic mechanisms that have contributed to both the divergence of their genome from other eukaryotes,

I was trained as a plant biologist using Arabidopsis http://www.arabidopsis.org/ as a model plant to study the photorespiratory pathway.  Although I once vowed never to work with that pesky weed ever again, we are actively characterizing plant polyamine transporters with the long term goal of understanding how long distance transport of these compounds contribute to the plant response to stress and environmental signals.