The Promise of Agriculture Genomics

摘要

Withthefactofgrowingglobalpopulation,changingclimate,and environmental pressure, there is an urgent need toaccelerate breeding novel crops with higher production,drought or heat tolerance, and less pesticide usage. Advancesin genomics offer the potential to speed up the process ofdeveloping crops with promising agronomic traits. Agriculture genomics is the application of genomics in agricultureto improve the productivity and sustainability in crop andlivestock production. With the combination of traditionaland high-throughput sequencing platforms, there has been atremendous increase in genomic resources available, including expressed sequence tags (ESTs), BAC end sequence,genetic sequence polymorphisms, gene expression profiling,whole-genome (re)sequencing, and genome-wide association studies. Given the emergence of genomic sequencingand expansion of bioinformatic tools, we are shifting fromsingle gene study to whole-genome analysis, which offersa broader view of how all genes work together. Therefore,this special issue was organized, comprising eleven originalresearch papers and three reviews aimed to highlight recentadvances in (1) comparative genomics for plant breeding,(2) transcriptome analysis for plant breeding, (3) genotypingand marker-assisted breeding, and (4) recombinant DNAtechnology (Figure 1).