Related Studies on Horticultural Tree Leaves

Dear Colleagues,

Horticultural tree crops consist of a wide range of plant family including citrus, grape, peach, mango, persimmon etc. The fruits are one of the most important sources of nutrition such as sugars, vitamins and organic acids, and thus, they are commercially important agricultural crops all over the world. Due to the importance, many researches concerning the tree crops have focused on their fruit, and now, many of the fruit crops have been suggested to contain functional and pharmacological compounds as well as nutritional compounds. Despite well-studied fruits of horticultural tree plants, reports focusing biology and physiology of leaves are limited.

It is known that plant leaves play important roles not only as photosynthetic tissues but also as defense barriers against herbivores or pathogens and as sensors of environmental changes, and thus, leaves have developed numbers of functional metabolites to protect against biotic and abiotic stresses. Plant leaves, therefore, one of the most important tissues for understanding the physiology and biology. Moreover, the functional metabolites in leaves usually show pharmacological activities. Knowledge about leaves of them such as responses to herbivores or pathogen and utilization of pruned leaves is therefore necessary to develop the sustainable agriculture. However, as described above, knowledge about horticultural tree leaves is quite limited and is not organized. Therefore, comprehensive information about physiological, biochemical, proteomic and molecular biological data for various plant species could greatly help us to understand the roles and availabilities of leaves of horticultural tree crops. Research articles, reviews, short notes, and opinion articles focused on citrus leaves are welcome for our current Special Issue on “Related Studies on Horticultural Tree Leaves”.

Dr. Tetsuya Matsukawa

Guest Editor

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