Legumes and non-leguminous crops are vital sources of essential nutrients, including proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins, and serve as raw materials for food and animal feed production. However, these crops face significant challenges due to various environmental stresses such as diseases, insect pests, drought, heat stress, salinity, and waterlogging, which adversely affect their growth, development, and productivity. The current agricultural landscape lacks innovative breeding tools that are cost-effective, rapid, and environmentally friendly, which are crucial for developing quality crop traits for both subsistence and commercial farming. Recent scientific advancements have explored methods such as seed priming, mutation breeding, and tissue culture-based genetic improvement to enhance crop resilience. These techniques involve inducing pre-germinative metabolism in seeds, using chemical or physical mutagenesis to create improved cultivars, and employing sterile nutrient cultures to propagate plants with beneficial genetic traits. Despite these advancements, there remains a need for further research to optimize these methods and address existing limitations, such as high costs, genotype-specificity, and consumer acceptance challenges.

This research topic aims to explore the role of seed priming, mutation breeding, and tissue culture-based genetic improvement in enhancing the growth and yield of leguminous and non-leguminous crops. The primary objective is to investigate how these techniques can be optimized to develop stress-tolerant crop varieties, improve agricultural productivity, and mitigate the adverse effects of climate change. The research will focus on evaluating the effectiveness of these methods in minimizing the use of agrochemicals and expanding food production. Additionally, the study will address the challenges associated with modern genomic tools, such as gene editing and RNA interference, and explore their potential to make a significant impact on crop improvement.

To gather further insights in the genetic improvement of leguminous and non-leguminous crops, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Agronomically essential traits
- Biotic and abiotic stresses in plants
- Leguminous and non-leguminous crop breeding
- Pests and diseases management
- Stress responses from mutant populations
- In vitro cell culture-based genetic modification
- Micropropagation of legumes
- Seed priming and use of biostimulants for stress tolerance

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Frontiers in Horticulture

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