Identification and Functional Dissection of Genes Regulating Early Maturity and Disease Resistance in Crops

The demand put on crops continues to rapidly increase along with rapid increases in population and drastic reduction in cultivable land. However, the planting area of many crops has been limited by seasonal climate change because of their long growing periods. Additionally, frequent natural disasters are becoming major limiting factors affecting crop productivity. Early maturity and disease resistance are the two most important agronomic traits that can alleviate these adverse effects. For example, in cotton breeding, early-maturing varieties have been developed to shorten the growing period, allowing for late sowing and early harvesting to minimize losses caused by natural disasters. Therefore, revealing and confirming the function of candidate elite alleles involved in early maturity and disease resistance may be of value toward to creating elite germplasm in cotton, and indeed in many crops.

Crop quality and yield are largely affected by long growing periods and natural disasters. However, the current molecular regulatory network for early maturity and disease resistance is incomplete. Therefore, discovering novel early-maturing and disease-resistant factors and obtaining early-maturing and disease-resistant crop varieties has always been an important goal of crop breeding. This special issue aims to discover elite alleles or loci in major crops and create superior crop germplasm by combining novel early-maturation and disease-resistance via multiple elite gene aggregation using genetic transformation, gene editing, or molecular marker-assisted selection methods.

For this Research Topic, we encourage the submission of high-quality articles that unveil the regulatory mechanisms underlying early-maturation and disease-resistance. We welcome original Research, reviews, Mini-reviews, and Opinion articles covering, but not limited to:

1. Discovery of key genes/proteins and their regulatory mechanism related to early-maturation and disease-resistance in major crops.
2. Marker-assisted selection (MAS) applied to early-maturing and disease-resistant breeding programs.
3. Discovery of elite alleles and loci related to early-maturation and disease-resistance through population, multi-omics, and other analysis.
4. Gene editing and transgenic technology applied to crop early-maturing and disease-resistant breeding.
5. Summaries of the progress of genomics and related genomics technologies in crop early-maturation and disease-resistance.

Please note that all submissions must conform to journal guidelines which can be found here.

Keywords: Crop, early maturity, disease resistance, molecular marker-assisted breeding, high-quality, multi-omics, regulatory mechanism

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.