Plant Breeding: Molecular Genetics, Challenges, Opportunities and Future Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

We are serving as the Guest Editors for the Special Issue “Plant Breeding: Molecular Genetics, Challenges, Opportunities and Future Perspectives” in the journal Genes (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genes). The rapidly increasing global population has resulted in a reduction in the amount of productive agricultural lands and cultivated cropped area. Furthermore, rapid changes in the regional and global climates are causing multiple biotic and abiotic stresses, i.e., drought, heat, high temperatures and various types of diseases, etc., which are more challenging in the current scenario. To overcome such types of problems in a changing climatic environment there is a dire need for the adoption of new molecular plant breeding and plant genetics techniques for the improvement of various plant varieties with a broader genetic base. A larger and more prosperous human population will place unprecedented demands on our food system. Indeed, it is thought that food production will need to double worldwide to meet future needs. This increasing demand, coupled with the impacts of climate change, will require advanced crop development that takes full advantage of modern plant breeding and genetics techniques, genomics, bioinformatics, mutation breeding, plant biology and systems biology. Management systems must be devised to realize the potential of these new technologies. While increasing the yield of agriculture is essential, it is also critical to simultaneously reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. Numerous strategies are being used to sustain agricultural production, including the development of climate-resilient genotypes, land races, wild species, and elite breeding lines, etc. These may include a combination of many different techniques, i.e., genetic resources, crop evolution, genetic diversity, utilization of wide-type germplasms, utilization of wild-type species and utilization of modern hybridization and mutation breeding techniques. These may be effective in improving the quality and yield under various types of stresses in a changing climatic environment.

This Special Issue will focus on the impacts of producing genetic variants, gene mapping populations, mutation mapping, breeding populations (RILs, NILs, F₂, etc.), the genetic modification of plants, marker association with plant traits, the identification of new QTLs linked with distinct traits, the identification of genotypic and phenotypic associations, and the evolution of new crop varieties and new plant populations through breeding and genetics. Research, review articles, editorials and short communications focusing on any of the above-described aspects will be gladly considered for this Special Issue.

Dr. Muhammad Ashfaq
Dr. Xianting Wu
Guest Editors

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. Genes 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.

• breeding
• genetics
• gene identification
• crop improvement
• genetic mapping
• breeding populations
• marker-assisted selection
• traits improvements
• crop evolution under stress environments
• mutation breeding
• molecular characterization