At first glance, an aging industrial section of Cambridge, Mass., seems an odd place to look for the future of agriculture. The only plants are weeds along the railroad tracks and well-tended shrubs and trees dotting the entrances to the high-tech businesses that are rejuvenating the area. The agricultural heartland of the United States is a thousand miles away.

And you won't find any greenhouses or pots of experimental plants inside Cereon Genomics. It looks like any other molecular genetics lab. Technicians prepare bar-coded samples; nearby, rows of sophisticated instruments that were originally developed for sequencing human genes form a high-speed manufacturing line. The difference is that the raw materials for this gene factory are often snippets of plants, and the product is information on the plant's DNA-their genetic blueprints.