Molecular Techniques for Modern Plant Breeding

A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Genetics, Genomics and Biotechnology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2025 | Viewed by 690

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources (IBBR), National Research Council (CNR), Via Ugo La Malfa 153, 90146 Palermo, Italy
Interests: plant genetics; plant nutrition; breeding; molecular markers; NGS (next-generation sequencing); PGPR
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Guest Editor
Department AGRARIA, University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Località Feo di Vito SNC, I-89124 Reggio Calabria, Italy
Interests: plant genetics and breeding; molecular-assisted selection (MAS); vegetable crops (mainly tomato and eggplant); abiotic stress; nitrogen use efficiency (NUE); genetic structure of plant biodiversity; genomics; transcriptomics; genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS)
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources (IBBR), National Research Council (CNR), Via Ugo La Malfa 153, 90146 Palermo, Italy
Interests: bioinformatics; plant genetics; nitrogen use efficiency (NUE); vegetable crops (mainly durum wheat, vitis vinifera and tomato); abiotic stress response; metagenomics and soil–plant interaction

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, conventional methods and molecular tools were successfully adopted in plant breeding to improve key agronomic traits in crops. However, changes in climate, the reduced land area available for food production, and the growing human population have forced rapid changes in the global food supply that the conventional breeding approaches are not guaranteed to accommodate.

Recently, omics technologies sustained the development of high-throughput screening approaches to speed up trait improvement in crops with a new evolution of plant breeding, more able to clarify the relationship between genotype and phenotype. Genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and phenomics, supported by bioinformatics approaches, are helping to understand the molecular basis of complex traits and improving the knowledge about the key mechanisms behind crop features. The omics-assisted breeding shows advantages, with a positive impact on genetic crop improvement, allowing the plant geneticists to discover genes, regulatory sequences, and markers useful for a more powerful marker-assisted selection (MAS). Omics technologies may furnish plant breeders with the opportunity of “tailoring” new plant varieties, focusing on bolstering resilience by improving tolerance/resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and/or increasing the yield of higher-quality plants for a low-impact, sustainable, and green agriculture, providing also social and environmental benefits.

This Special Issue of Plants aims to publish original research articles, reviews, or shorter perspective articles on all the aspects related to omics approaches for advancing the knowledge and the genetic dissection of agronomic complex traits of interest, as well as elucidating the role of plant/bacteria interaction to overcome stress (abiotic and biotic) and to support plant growth, reducing the impact on the environment. Studies applying omics technologies and exploring their possible integration through bioinformatic approaches as tools to support a low-impact and sustainable agriculture are welcome. 

Dr. Francesco Mercati
Dr. Francesco Sunseri
Dr. Guglielmo Puccio
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • omics
  • abiotic and biotic stress tolerance
  • sustainable agriculture
  • PGPR
  • QTLs
  • crop breeding

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

16 pages, 5209 KiB  
Article
Multi-Omics Analysis Provides Insights into a Mosaic-Leaf Phenotype of Astaxanthin-Producing Tobacco
by Jialin Wang, Zaifeng Du, Xiaoyang Lin, Peng Li, Shihao Sun, Changqing Yang, Yong Chen, Zhongfeng Zhang, Xue Yin and Ning Fang
Plants 2025, 14(6), 965; https://doi.org/10.3390/plants14060965 - 19 Mar 2025
Viewed by 364
Abstract
In metabolically engineered plants, the target products are usually uniformly distributed in the whole plant or specific tissues. When engineering tobacco to produce astaxanthin, a ketocarotenoid with strong antioxidant activity and multiple bioactivities, a scattered distribution of astaxanthin-producing regions was observed in a [...] Read more.
In metabolically engineered plants, the target products are usually uniformly distributed in the whole plant or specific tissues. When engineering tobacco to produce astaxanthin, a ketocarotenoid with strong antioxidant activity and multiple bioactivities, a scattered distribution of astaxanthin-producing regions was observed in a small portion of astaxanthin-producing tobacco plants, which caused mosaic-like red and green spots on the leaves (ASTA-mosaic). A physiological assay showed that the non-astaxanthin green region (Mosaic_G) had relatively higher chlorophyll content and better chloroplast structure than the astaxanthin-producing red region (Mosaic_R). Then, metabolomics, proteomics, and small RNA transcriptomics were employed to analyze the uneven distribution of astaxanthin-producing regions in tobacco leaves. The results of metabolomics and proteomics revealed a decrease in carotenoid metabolism, chlorophyll biosynthesis, and chlorophyll degradation in the Mosaic_G region. Pheophorbide a, an intermediate of chlorophyll degradation, was found to be significantly reduced in the Mosaic_G region, which was accompanied by the attenuation of chlorophyllase and pheophytinase, which catalyze the formation of pheophorbide a in chlorophyll degradation. Reductions in photosynthetic antenna proteins and photosystem-associated proteins were observed in the Mosaic_R region, consistent with the better chloroplast structure of the Mosaic_G region. Small RNA transcriptomics showed that several small RNAs could target chlorophyll-degradative genes, but they were more effective in targeting the astaxanthin biosynthetic genes. This finding was supported by the fact that the Mosaic_G region can remain green up to the senescence of tobacco leaves. This work provides insights into the mechanism of the uneven distribution of astaxanthin-producing regions in tobacco leaves and may contribute to the specialized utilization of tobacco plants for metabolic engineering. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Molecular Techniques for Modern Plant Breeding)
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