Genetics- and Genomics-Based Wheat Improvement and Breeding
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 June 2026 | Viewed by 5
Special Issue Editor
Interests: wheat molecular genetics and genomics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In recent decades, plant breeding has greatly and steadily improved the performance of crops, including wheat and its related species (e.g., maize, oat, rye, rice, barley, millet, and sorghum). However, the growing global demand for food driven by population increase, together with a reduction in available land, requires these cereal crops to become not only more productive but also more resilient to harsh environmental conditions resulting from climate change.
The development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has profoundly advanced science research. Researchers now have unprecedented opportunities to identify genes controlling complex phenotypes and to understand how these genes function through interactions with environmental factors. This progress provides new avenues for wheat breeding programs, significantly reducing the cost and time required by traditional breeding or domestication approaches. Nevertheless, most breeding programs still largely depend on conventional selection methods that require repeated and time-consuming fieldwork.
Therefore, it is essential to fully exploit advances in NGS for cereal crops, together with high-throughput phenotyping and genotyping platforms, to genetically identify, evaluate, and characterize excavate germplasm resources and loci/genes for wheat improvement.
In this Special Issue, we aim to promote advances in wheat crop improvement and invite the submission of original research articles, reviews and mini-reviews, methods papers, perspectives, and opinion articles on topics including, but not limited to, the following areas:
- Identification, evaluation, and characterization of various germplasm resources;
- Identification and breeding utilization of favorable alleles which have not been fully explored;
- Genetic mapping, fine mapping, and genome-wide association analyses of loci/genes for underlying important traits;
- Development and breeding utilization of molecular markers tightly linked to important traits;
- Structural and functional genomics in wheat, as well as proteomics, metabolic profiling, and field evaluation of wheat crops containing particular traits.
Prof. Dr. Jian Ma
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- wheat crop
- germplasm
- genetics
- genomics
- breeding
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