About this Research Topic

Background

To feed the burgeoning world population, global food production must increase drastically. This is becoming more challenging with the imminent threats of global climate change, especially the incidences of abiotic stresses, such as drought, heat, and salinity are predicted to increase soon. Global climate change may also affect plant-biotic interactions. Additionally, modernization in underdeveloped and developing countries is expected to decrease available land for agricultural usage. Thus, to achieve sustainable agricultural development, it is imperative to produce more food without using additional land and other valuable resources, including water. These necessitates should develop novel, rapid, and robust crop improvement methods that complement traditional plant breeding approaches.

Crop improvement strategies to tackle future challenges necessitate the elucidation of underlying genes and gene regulatory networks. The dwindling cost of next-generation sequencing and the emergence of novel sequencing approaches, such as long-read sequencing technology (e.g., PacBio, Oxford Nanopore, and others) are transforming agricultural research at an unprecedented rate is opening a plethora of opportunities in turbocharging crop improvement initiatives. Recent advances in next-generation sequencing will continue to play a pivotal role in future crop improvement efforts. However, the progress of genomic technologies has not been uniformed world-wide. Thus, it is now relevant to compile a collection of recent advancements in the field of structural, functional, and comparative genomics and its relevance to crop improvement, so that it is disseminated to a broader audience.

This Research Topic welcomes original research articles, mini-review articles, full-length review articles, perspectives, opinions, method papers, hypothesis, and theory papers. We welcome the submission of articles related to all aspects of structural, functional, and comparative plant genomics, including the following (but not limited to) research themes:

- Next-generation sequencing approaches to elucidate the regulation of gene expression (including the transcriptional, post-transcriptional, translational, post-translational, and epigenetic levels of regulation) implicated in diverse developmental and physiological processes (including responses to abiotic and biotic stresses) in different crop plants (e.g., grain crops, vegetables, fruits, root crops, forage crops, specialty crops, and others).

- Use of comparative genomics to underpin molecular bases of evolution of plant processes, to rapidly and efficiently identify evolutionarily conserved genes involved in the regulation of key developmental and physiological processes.

- Use of long-read sequencing technology to unearth molecular bases of responses to abiotic and biotic stresses.

- Development of novel bioinformatic tools and databases to aid in structural, functional, and comparative plant genomics studies.

- Crop improvement using genomics-enabled plant breeding approaches (including but not limited to resequencing, GWAS, QTLseq, eQTL, metabolite-level association studies, and others).

Keywords: crop improvement, next-generation sequencing, QTL, epigenetics, genomics, plant breeding

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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