About this Research Topic

Background

Crop domestication is the process of selective breeding and genetic modification of wild plants to crops over time to improve traits that are desirable to humans. This process is one of the critical factors that led to the development of agriculture and the ability of humans to produce food sustainably. As environmental change has become an urgent issue, it is important to study the domestication process and crop wild relatives to identify abiotic and biotic resistant genes and agronomic trait-related genes to improve our agriculture further. Furthermore, the continued process of crop improvement and selection continues to play a critical role in meeting the food needs of a growing global population.

The process of crop domestication began around 10,000 years ago. Nowadays, the crops that have been domesticated and selected for human use include cereals, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and tubers, among others. Meanwhile, crops are also dispersed worldwide and adapted to different cultivated environments. Recently, there has been increasing focus on under-utilized crops and indigenous fruit tree species in addressing global food security. Studying the crop domestication process in all these valuable food crops will help us identify potential new environment adaptation genes which can be further utilized to conquer current climate change challenges. Exploring crop wild relatives, landraces, and weedy and under-utilized crop resources as novel sources of genetic diversity can offer us more choices to breed sustainable crops with improved traits for a changing climate.

We invite submissions of original research articles, review articles, methods, and perspectives addressing or related to:

1. The function or mechanism of crop domesticated genes or traits under natural or artificial selection
2. Evolutionary process or demographic history analyses of crop domestication
3. Crop wild relatives and their potential use for crop improvement
4. Plant genetic improvement and breeding
5. Bioinformatic methods on population genetics, phylogenomics, and GWAS
6. Germplasm collection and conservation for crop wild relatives, landraces, weedy and under-utilized crops
7. De novo domestication with CRISPR technology

Keywords: domestication, evolution, selection, agronomic traits, genomics, crop wild relatives

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