About this Research Topic

Background

An efficient and sustainable agricultural production system is vital to human survival. Global annual food production requires million of tons of fertilizers, pesticides, and freshwater. However, agricultural production is facing serious environmental degradation. Since a myriad of fertilizers and pesticides are used during the agricultural production processes, the soil can become degraded due to harmful components, which lead to soil pollution and destroy fertility. Environmental degradation is a very serious problem that would cause pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation and desertification, global warming, and so on. These environmental degradations are already impacting crop yields, yield stability, and the quality of crops in the future. To meet the human demand for enough and high-quality food, many new scientific and technological revolutions have emerged, including omics-technologies. The omics-technologies are high throughput technologies and belong to the concept of systems biology, which mainly includes genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, phenomics, lipidomics, glycomics, and single-cell RNA transcriptome, etc. Omics-technologies bring numerous benefits that will provide new insights into basic research and crop breeding. It also holds potential application to enable the discovery of new candidate genes to further verify their function for subsequent crop trait improvements.

In recent years, omics-technologies have developed rapidly. Omics technologies have generated many datasets for different crops. These datasets mainly include genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and phenome. Combining analysis of genetic and phenotypic data using omics approaches is an efficient way to identify genes responsible for important agronomic traits. These various omics approaches help to identify important genes for developing the breeding materials by greatly accelerating breeding progress and improving the precision and scope of novel agronomic traits, such as resistance to pathogens, resistance to pests, and other adverse environmental stresses in major crops.

The aim of this Research Topic is to provide new insights into recent advancements in this field, particularly the identification of new candidate genes for crop trait improvement by omics-technology, aiming to resist the adverse stress factors, increasing crop yields or quality by using these omics approaches and tools. In this Research Topic, we welcome all article types published by Frontiers in Plant Science that dissect the use of omics-technologies as tools of modern and sustainable agriculture, especially those that focus on:

1. The use of omics-technologies to breed varieties with high resistance to the biotic or abiotic stresses on crops
2. Studies that report the agronomical traits of growth, yield, or quality by omics-technologies will also be considered, to better progress physiological understanding of these traits
3. The advancement of omics analyses of different agronomic traits in major crops, such as genomics, transcriptome, proteome, metabolomics, phenome, and single-cell RNA transcriptome of the crops
4. The application of omics-technologies on crop production and breeding for sustainable crop production

Keywords: crop production, biotic or abiotic stresses, yield and quality, omics-technologies

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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