Novel Plant Breeding Approaches for Achieving Zero Hunger

Dear Colleagues,

Food security is threatened by the global population rise, the impact of climate change on crop growth and production, and limited land available for agricultural expansion. The World Food Programme estimated that around 135 million people suffer from acute hunger mainly due to persistent conflicts, climate change, and economic insecurity. The COVID-19 pandemic has further jeopardized access to food, dramatically worsening word hunger.

Conventional plant breeding, novel plant breeding techniques (NPBTs), and other breakthrough agricultural technologies have a central role in hunger reduction. In particular, NPBTs may contribute considerably to attaining sustainable agriculture, including new strategies to obtain resilient varieties and crops that have high yield potential, yield stability, and superior grain quality and nutrition; nevertheless, limiting water consumption and reducing the use of fertilizer and chemicals are primary goals of NPBTs for environmental protection. Recently, OMICs, genome-wide association study (GWAS), and genome editing (GE) approaches have proven themselves as powerful tools to overcome substantial obstacles in the way of efficiency and productivity of current agricultural practices. Knowledge of genomics and next-generation sequencing have further improved our understanding of modern and genome editing techniques available to plant breeders. In this Special Issue, a wide range of topics will be covered, including conventional and non-conventional plant breeding approaches, marker-assisted selection, genomic region analysis, mutation breeding, OMICs, epigenetics, genotyping by sequencing, nanotechnology, and GE techniques widely utilized in crop production systems to increase productivity for achieving the second United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger.

Dr. Sajid Fiaz
Dr. Ambrosone Alfredo
Guest Editors

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