Omics Approaches for A Sustainable and Low-impact Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

This is second edition of the Special Issue, Omics in Plant Genetics and Breeding, that previously published 12 papers. 

Over the past decades, conventional methods and molecular tools have been successfully adopted in plant breeding to improve important agronomic traits in crop plants. However, climatic change, a reduced land area available for food production, and the growing human population have imposed rapid changes onto the global food supply that the conventional breeding approaches are not guaranteed to accommodate.

Recently, the omics technologies have sustained the development of high-throughput screening approaches, accelerating trait improvement in crops via a new evolution in plant breeding that is better 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 the advantages with a positive impact on genetic crop improvement, allowing plant geneticists to discover genes, regulatory sequences, and markers useful for novel marker-assisted selection (MAS). Omics technologies give plant breeders the possibility of “tailoring” new plant varieties with more resilience by improving tolerance/resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and/or with increased yield of higher quality for a low-impact, sustainable and green agriculture, whilst also providing social and environmental benefits.

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

Dr. Francesco Mercati
Dr. Francesco Carimi
Dr. Francesco Sunseri
Dr. Antonio Mauceri
Guest Editors

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

• Omics in Plant Genetics and Breeding in Cells (12 articles)