Dear Colleagues,

Vegetables are closely related to daily human life. They not only decorate food with their colorful appearance but also guarantee the health of the people with their comprehensive and rich nutrition, especially bioactive compounds from secondary metabolism. Vegetables contain a variety of secondary metabolites, including carotenoids, flavonoids, glucosinolates, and anthocyanins, among others. These secondary metabolites are widely involved in growth and development, resistance against biotic and abiotic stresses, quality characteristics and formation, and other physiological processes of vegetable crops. Likewise, they can be influenced by intrinsic genetic factors and extrinsic environmental factors, as well as postharvest handlings. In model plants, great progress has been made in understanding the biosynthesis, degradation, and regulation of secondary metabolites; however, major gaps regarding vegetable crops remain in the literature. Today, the genomic sequence of an increasing number of vegetable crops has been explored, facilitating the elucidation of the regulatory mechanisms of secondary metabolites in vegetable crops together with other technologies, such as omics (transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, etc.), gene editing technologies (ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR, etc.), and bioinformatics. Therefore, in this Special Issue, articles (original research papers, perspectives, hypotheses, opinions, reviews, and methods) that focus on the regulatory mechanisms of secondary metabolism and their role in vegetable growth and development, as well as responses to environmental stresses, quality characteristics and changes at transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and epigenetic levels, are most welcome.

Prof. Dr. Bo Sun
Dr. Huiying Miao
Guest Editors

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• secondary metabolites
• biosynthesis, degradation, and regulation
• growth and development
• biotic and abiotic stress responses
• quality characteristics
• postharvest
• gene function
• omics studies
• gene editing
• bioinformatics