Identification and Application of Natural Genetic Resources for Plant Improvement

Dear Colleagues,

Maybe the most fascinating thing in biology is diversity. Without diversity, we would not expect evolution. Throughout evolutionary history, plants developed various survival strategies in their metabolisms, developments, and defenses to environmental constraints. This means that many plants might have elite or superior gene alleles that show more favorable traits than others. Mining of these superior alleles becomes important when it comes to modern crops. Modern crop domestication favored crop yield over the other traits such as stress tolerance. Thus, many such traits have been lost in modern crops. Now the global climate issues and the world food crisis make us look another direction – we need to re-introduce the lost traits to improve plants and crops. With the accumulated knowledge of gene functions and the current biotechniques such as gene editing tools, we could control the yield penalty that we might need to pay by introducing lost or new traits. The first step is to find natural genetic resources from crop progenitors, natural variants, and extremophiles.

This Special Issue is designed to help discussions in natural genetic resources for plant improvements, and accepts reviews and research articles that covers the identification and use of elite alleles preferably in a comparative study.

Prof. Dr. Byeong-ha Lee
Guest Editor

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