Trends in Mutation Breeding, Seed Priming and Tissue Culture-Based Genetic Improvement of Leguminous and Non-Leguminous Crops for Stress Tolerance

Legumes and non-leguminous crops serve as the most important sources of edible vegetables, high-quality oils, proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, and raw materials used to produce food and feed for animal consumption. However, various environmental stresses, such as diseases, insect pests, drought, heat stress, salinity, and waterlogging impose adverse effects on their growth, development, and reproduction, causing low productivity and poor grain quality. The global lack thereof, of new agricultural breeding tools offering cost-effective, rapid, and environmentally friendly advancements for the development of quality crop traits required for both subsistence and commercial farming is still a challenge. At the scientific level, inducing seeds to a state of pre-germinative metabolism with the help of chemicals, hormones or microbial inoculants may increase germination rate and vigour. While artificial mutagenic breeding can be used to obtain newly improved cultivars via chemical or physical mutagenesis. These tools also use a collection of techniques that maintain the growth of plant cells, tissues, and organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture to establish more plants even from cells harbouring point mutations in their genes. Therefore, research uses field or laboratory-based techniques such as genetic modification to alter the DNA makeup of these crops to confer tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Furthermore, the use of botanical extracts shows a prospective future in functional plant nutrition associated with plant growth and development, as well as increased food quality parameters. An evaluation of the role of seed priming, mutation breeding and tissue culture-based genetic improvement of legumes and non-leguminous crops is therefore, one of the biggest opportunities for expanding food production, finding new ways to make crops tolerant to environmental stress, minimising the use of agrochemicals, improving agricultural productivity, and mitigating the adverse effects of climate change.

This Research Topic seeks to provide research updates on the role of seed priming, mutation breeding, and tissue culture-based genetic improvement, for increased growth and yield of crops. Research on crop improvement has made substantial progress, especially using modern genomic tools such as gene editing, RNA interference and trans-grafting. However, the abovementioned tools enable precise and rapid genetic modifications with unchanged general characteristics of the plant. Many of them are poised to make the biggest impact, however, they still grapple with achieving sufficient consumer acceptance, require highly skilled personnel, are prone to genotype-specificity and fail to unlock opportunities due to the high cost of operations. This collection will explore the optimisation of traditional breeding techniques, priming and plant cell culture in developing better-quality seeds and stress-resistant varieties in legumes. It will provide research updates that will shed some light on the limitations such as the high degree of heterozygosity, irreproducibility, and the benefits of new improvements, cost-effectiveness and practicality that have potentially emerged and accompanying new developments from recently published works in this topic.


We welcome contributions from researchers and interested professionals in the area of plant biology and biotechnology which speak to this topic and report new findings that address their role in the mitigation of climate change and food insecurity. Recent advances in crop breeding through various biotechnological tools which work to speed up legume improvement will be highly encouraged. We welcome themes covering (but not limited to):

• 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

Keywords: Biotic and abiotic stress, Chemical priming, Climate smart agriculture, Crop quality, Environmental stress, Genetic engineering, Hormonal priming, Legumes, Microbial inoculants, Mutagenic breeding, Physical priming, Plant tissues culture

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.