Novel Breeding Technologies in Cereal Crops

Dear Colleagues,

Plant breeding traditionally has been a very successful endeavor and has delivered highly productive crops varieties worldwide. The rate of genetic improvement in novel varieties, however, needs accelerating to meet the projected future food demands. A revolution in genetics and plant breeding was promised in the late 1980s when techniques were discovered that had the power to capture naturally occurring sequence variations in DNA and turn them into genetic markers. Now dense genetic maps exist for most of the crop, and the whole genomes of tens of agriculturally important crops have now been sequenced and re-sequenced, making millions of heritable markers available to use in trait dissection and plant breeding. Together with genetic mapping, a number of other techniques such as genomic selection and prediction, double haploids, and genome editing have also evolved, offering plant breeders with novel methods. This Special Issue of Agronomy will assess the history of progress in these methods and the difference they are making toward better understanding and breeding agronomical and nutritional important traits. It will summarize all this in practical breeding contexts, using suitable examples from major (rice, wheat, maize) and minor cereals (like oats, pearl millet, and other minor millets), using expert contributors’ own work from across the globe. Contributions combining review papers, research articles, methodology papers, and opinion papers covering the above aspects are solicited.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agronomy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• genetics
• genomics
• genetic maps
• markers
• marker-assisted selection
• genetic gains
• plant breeding
• genomic selection
• genomic prediction
• genome editing
• double haploids
• gene editing
• rice
• maize
• wheat
• pearl millet
• minor millets
• oats