Dear Colleagues,

Plant breeders are witnessing a continuous evolution of breeding priorities amid population growth, unbalanced diet, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts in leading producing regions. These events have impacted socio-economic developments and the brought breeding community to the center stage of efforts to address these challenges.

Conventionally, vegetable breeders have used interspecific hybridization to introduce novel alleles into the primary genepool from secondary/tertiary genepools. However, linkage-drag is a major challenge associated with this practice, hence breeders have begun to utilize molecular markers to recover desirable alleles during pre-breeding. Additionally, breeders also use double haploidy to accelerate the introgression of desirable alleles. Recently, increased abiotic stresses are impacting crop performances as drought, salinity, and heat stress are occurring frequently, while the emergence of new pathogenic races and corresponding vectors is becoming a significant challenge. Therefore, the application of high-throughput phenotyping methods is necessary in efforts to understand genetic–molecular–physiological factors that trigger stress adaptation. Besides stresses, enhanced nutritional composition is important for fruit quality. Hence, the application of metabolomics is becoming essential in vegetable breeding. The availability of inexpensive genome sequencing and bioinformatics tools has encouraging breeders to utilize these resources, and they have since proven useful in gene discovery, trait prediction and breeding line identification. Overall, genetic gain has increased over the years, but prolonged breeding cycles still remains a big challenge. However, advances in controlled environment agriculture have truncated plant lifecycle and led to develop the LED light-supplemented breeding chambers that can be used to practice speed breeding in order to obtain multiple generations a year.

Considering the usefulness of diverse breeding tools, the deployment of inter-disciplinary techniques should look to manage stresses, improve fruit quality, expedite breeding process and enhance overall cultivar development. In this Special Issue, we seek to provide a platform for the discussion of vegetable breeding. We aim to showcase breeding applications, including phenomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics, transcriptomics/genomics, gene editing (CRISPR-Cas and QTL cloning), and speed breeding, in order to develop climate-resilient vegetables.

Dr. Amol N. Nankar
Dr. Pasquale Tripodi
Dr. Jagadish Rane
Guest Editors

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• integrated omics
• vegetable breeding
• speed breeding
• specialty crops
• stress adaptation
• climate resilient vegetables
• breeding tools
• genetic gain
• genomics
• gene editing
• metabolomics