Functional Genomics and Computational Biology of Horticultural Plants
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Plant Sciences".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2025 | Viewed by 24
Special Issue Editor
Interests: plant biotechnology; plant genetics; RNA silencing; plant genetic development
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Horticultural species represent a key crop group for the global agribusiness sector whose consumption contributes to a healthy and sustainable diet. With ongoing climate change, increasing global population, and susceptibility to both biotic and abiotic stresses, significant drawbacks to productivity and availability are expected, highlighting the need for more sustainable and resilient horticultural plant varieties with high nutritional value.
Functional genomics and computational biology in horticultural plants involve studying the functions of genes and their interactions within the plant's genome. Techniques like transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, as well as computational tools and methods to analyze and model biological data, will help understand plant traits, the complex biology of horticultural plants, stress responses, and biological mechanisms, leading to advancements in crop breeding and adapting plants to climate change for sustainable agriculture.
In addition, the integration of functional genomics with multi-omics data and computational biology technologies will be able to build biological networks to identify traits that can be further applied to horticultural crop selection and generate more productive crop varieties.
The scope of this Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:
- Gene function and regulation.
- Genetic improvement and breeding.
- Marker-assisted selection (MAS) and genomic selection.
- Genome editing tools (e.g., CRISPR/Cas9).
- Studying plant responses to environmental stress.
- RNA silencing.
- Comparative genomics.
- Mutagenesis and mutant libraries.
- High-throughput screening.
- Transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics.
- Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies.
- Application of bioinformatics tools.
- Multi-omics data integration.
- Building computational models to simulate plant growth, development, and responses to environmental factors.
- Model to predict plant traits, such as yield, disease resistance, and tolerance to stress.
- Computational models to understand the complex interactions between genes, proteins, and metabolites in plant cells.
Authors are cordially invited to contribute original research and reviews, offering insights into the evolving landscape of “Functional Genomics and Computational Biology of Horticultural Plants”.
Dr. Claudio Pugliesi
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- transcriptomics
- computational model
- genome editing
- GWAS
- multi-omics
- NGS technologies
- MAS
- genomic selection
- mutagenesis
- RNA-silencing
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