About this Research Topic

Background

Rice is a staple food as it feeds more than half of the World’s population and has been crucial for sustenance of human civilization. However, fluctuating and unfavorable environmental conditions, a result of global warming, are negatively impacting the production and quality of rice. Thus, improvement of rice “as a whole” is of utmost importance to address the issue of food security that has now become a global humanitarian concern because of the increasing global population, and unprecedented climate changes reducing arable land availability.

In particular, a better biological understanding of the various stages of growth and development of rice is much needed to improve its yield, which is largely dependent on resilience to environmental challenges, and biotic stresses. Research in the past three decades has deepened our understanding of rice as a whole, yet further advancements in “-omics” based technologies including transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics have provided a platform for systemic dissection of molecular pathways operating in this crop during development, and in response to various biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Omics-based tools and data repositories will certainly assist the analysis of rice complex genetic architecture, and prove useful in high-throughput crop improvement programs around the world. Differentially expressed novel alleles, proteins varying in abundance, and their relevant metabolites identified from these omics-based technologies, can serve as the potential targets for manipulation by genetic engineering or accelerated breeding based approaches to address the concern of food security.

In this special issue, we invite the articles related to the understanding of the biology of rice using high-throughput “-omics” technologies. Submission of all the article types including Review, Original Research, and Perspective/Opinion articles are welcome.

Topics to be covered:

1. Utilization of high-throughput “omics” based approaches to understand the biology of rice plants including grain filling and starch accumulation;
2. Understanding the genetic diversity of rice through –omics approaches;
3. Genome-wide analysis and genomic selection of rice plants;
4. Targeted and non-targeted -omics of rice under optimal and stressful environments;
5. Emergence of nutrigenomic research in rice;
6. Omics research of eco-toxicological responses in rice;

Please note: Descriptive collections of transcripts, proteins, and metabolites, including comparative sets as a result of different conditions or treatments, will not be considered for review unless they are expanded and provide physiological and/or mechanistic insights into the system or process being studied.
All submissions containing quantitative phenotypic data must be obtained from three or more independent test environments.

Keywords: Rice, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, high-throughput

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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