Evolution, Genomics, Metabolism, and Biotechnology for Cereal Crop Improvements

Dear Colleagues,

Cereal crops include both major staple food crops (etc. rice, maize, wheat and barley) and minor crops, such as sorghum, millet, pearl millet and teff, which have been widely used for or considered as promising sources of staple foods, coarse crops, forage and silage crops, fibers, and bioenergy crops. However, several factors have been threatening the global production of cereal crops: (1) world population is increasing, demanding more foods; (2) global climate change is leading to a frequent occurrence of extreme climates, requiring higher environmental adaptability to biotic and abiotic stresses; (3) water resources for the agricultural use are gradually decreasing and the land for superior agricultural production are degrading, putting forward higher yield and water and nutrient use efficiency of crops; (4) the trend of eating nutritious staple foods (such as whole-grain staples) demands the breading of crop varieties with better quality.

At present, to confront the challenges in crop improvement and to design modern varieties of cereal crops with higher yield, better environmental adaptability and better quality, molecular genetics, genomics (especially the evolutionary genomics and comparative genomics), mutli-omics and biotechnology approaches have been integrated in the up- and down-stream lines of molecular breading of crops. The major biotechnological tools for cereal crop improvements include (but not limited to) map-based cloning, marker-assisted selection, genomic selection, QTL-mapping, GWAS, metabolic analyses, integrative multi-omics analyses, transgenic and gene editing technologies, as well as nano-agricultural biotechnologies. As such, we develop this Special Issue as a continuation of our previous Special Issue “Genetics, Genomics and Biotechnology for Cereal Crop Improvements” to provide an updated forum with which to address these problems and present new strategies and progress towards the improvement of cereal crop species. In addition, the basic and applied researches for many understudied cereal crops have been greatly fallen behind compared to those of the model crops (e.g., rice), and such situations may be due to, at least partly, difficulties in traditional genetics methods (map-based cloning and QTL-mapping) and transformation and gene editing. As such, we emphasize that the involvement and integration of the above-mentioned approaches will help advance our understanding towards the evolution, domestication, genetics and genomics, metabolism of cereal crops (especially those understudied while potentially holding promise for the future climate-smart crops), thereby contributed to biotechnological applications and genetic improvement of cereal crops. 

Dr. Yin Li
Dr. Junli Chang
Dr. Min Tu
Guest Editors

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• cereals crops
• molecular genetics
• molecular breeding
• functional genomics
• evolutionary genomics
• comparative genomics
• multi-omics
• metabolic analyses
• biotechnology
• transgenic crops
• gene editing
• gene regulation
• crop nano-biotechnology
• crop improvement