Recent Advances in Crop Genetics and Breeding

Dear Colleagues

Global climate change and unfavorable abiotic and biotic stresses are limiting agricultural productivity, intensifying the challenges encountered by crop scientists in meeting the rising global food supply demand. As such, there is an urgent need to produce better crop varieties by efficiently using genetic resources and molecular tools, wherein the elucidation of the genetic and molecular basis of useful crop traits are key to variety development. High-throughput genotyping systems assisted by bioinformatics and data science provide efficient and easy tools for geneticists and breeders. Precise target genome modification, the absence of foreign DNA in genome-edited plants, and the faster and cheaper method of genome modification are remarkable features of the current genome-editing technology that have resulted in its widespread application in crop breeding over less than a decade.

This Special Issue will focus on recent advances in crop genetics and breeding, inviting researchers to contribute original research papers and reviews on the potential themes including, but not limited to, the following:

• Identification and functional analysis of QTL and genes for crop improvement;
• Candidate gene and favorable allele identification for yield and biotic and abiotic stress tolerance;
• Favorable haplotype-based molecular breeding;
• Novel breeding techniques in crops, such as targeted mutagenesis, genome editing, etc.;
• Genomic selection.

Dr. Tianxiao Chen
Dr. Xiangjin Wei
Dr. Baohua Feng
Dr. Long Chen
Guest Editors

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