Advanced Chromosome Engineering and Molecular Breeding for Disease Resistance in Crops and Their Wild Relatives
A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Crop Breeding and Genetics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 21
Special Issue Editors
Interests: crops and wild relatives; disease resistance; chromosome engineering; molecular cytogenetics; molecular breeding
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Crop diseases remain among the most serious biological threats to global food production, causing substantial and recurrent yield and quality losses across agroecological regions. Moreover, with the acceleration of climate change, the emergence of new pathogen species, and the narrowing of crop genetic diversity due to modern breeding practices, achieving durable and broad-spectrum disease resistance has become a critical frontier in agricultural science. The wild relatives of crops harbor extensive, yet largely untapped, genomic variation that can substantially broaden the genetic base of modern cultivars and enhance their resilience to both biotic and abiotic stresses.
Mining and harnessing the beneficial genes/alleles through advanced chromosome engineering, molecular cytogenetics, and molecular breeding represent transformative approaches for developing disease-resistant germplasm. Recent breakthroughs in cytogenetic methodologies—such as ND-FISH and GISH—now permit precise and scalable visualization and identification of introgressed chromosomal segments from wild species. Concurrently, the integration of genomic technologies—including marker-assisted selection, genome editing, and genomic prediction—with high-throughput phenotyping and multi-environment evaluation accelerates the discovery-to-deployment continuum for resistance genes. These synergistic approaches are bridging the gap between gene mining and practical resistance breeding.
This Special Issue welcomes original research that advances our understanding and application of disease resistance mined from crops and their wild relatives through the integration of chromosome engineering, molecular cytogenetics, and molecular breeding. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, exploration and utilization of wild germplasm for resistance improvement; development and cytogenetic analysis of introgression, addition, substitution, or translocation lines; mapping, cloning, and functional characterization of qualitative and quantitative resistance loci; innovation in cytogenetic and molecular diagnostic tools; genome editing and genomic selection for resistance; high-throughput genotyping and phenotyping; resistance pyramiding and population improvement; and integrative breeding frameworks that combine pathogen biology with crop genetic enhancement. We also encourage methods, datasets, resources, short communications, and reviews or perspective articles that summarize advances and outline emerging directions in this rapidly evolving field.
Dr. Guohao Han
Dr. Yajuan Wang
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- crops and wild relatives
- disease resistance
- gene mining
- chromosome engineering
- molecular cytogenetics
- molecular breeding
- introgression lines
- distant hybridization
- durable resistance
- genome editing
- genomic selection
- high-throughput phenotyping
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