About this Research Topic

Background

Poaceae, the grass family, is one of the most economically important plant families. Grasses cover around 40% of Earth’s land surface and provide over one-half (51%) of all dietary energy. Due to selection imposed by ancient life history events and more recent breeding efforts, grasses have evolved extensive diversity in morphological and physiological traits to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Understanding the constraints associated with local adaptation and the molecular genetic basis of adaptive and agronomic traits therefore has profound evolutionary implications and is of critical economic significance.

Over the past two decades, rice has developed as the first genome model in cereal crops for functional studies and has paved the way for other crops with complex genomes (e.g. maize and wheat). Recently, wild grass species, especially those related to crops, have come to the forefront of grass research, having been greatly accelerated by next-generation sequencing and the remarkable efforts of community-based projects. Comparing domesticated crops with wild grass species will improve our understanding of selection history and help to enhance the resilience of the agroecosystem to climate change.

Understanding how parallel selection drives the adaptation of polygenic traits is a key challenge in evolutionary biology. Abundant genetic/genomic resources in grass species provide an opportunity to explore the diversity of adaptation strategies. Here, we propose a Research Topic to bring together the latest advances in genetic evolution and local adaptation in grass biology, covering themes related to the genetic and molecular basis associated with agronomic traits in cereal crops and adaptive traits in native wild grasses. We are also interested in comparing how evolution leads to variation in genomic regulatory networks, and how plant-microbe interactions impact local adaptation. We aim to explore new wild grass resources to improve the adaptation of the agroecosystem and ensure sustainable livelihoods and food security.

We therefore welcome Original Research and Review articles covering:
• Genetic architecture and molecular basis of yield component traits in domesticated crops;
• Life history variation maintained by fitness traits trade-offs in native wild grasses;
• Gene regulatory networks and epigenetic landscapes in varying environmental conditions within and across grass species;
• Comparative study of morphological, physiological, and molecular genetic diversity in non-model grass systems;
• Plant-microbe interactions in grasses associated with the local adaptation;
• Interrelation of gene duplication and evolutionary radiations across grass genomes.

Purely descriptive studies that do not address a clear evolutionary hypothesis in a broader context or that provide only incremental advancement of knowledge (e.g., studies describing gene functions or morphological structures, pure applications of DNA barcoding, species descriptions without a phylogenetic framework, or aspects of plant nomenclature) do not fall within the scope of the section. Likewise, studies limited to descriptive characterizations of single-gene families and genome architectures (e.g. generically including phylogenetic analysis, molecular evolutionary analysis and perhaps expression data) do not fall within the scope of the section.

Keywords: grasses, grass, poaceae, rice, adaptive evolution, genomics

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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