The advent of high-throughput omics techniques has revolutionized our understanding of the intricate molecular mechanisms underlying plant growth, development, and stress responses. Continuing to advance our understanding of omics technologies in horticulture research is crucial. Omics technologies indeed allow us to reveal the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying key traits and regulatory responses in horticultural crops, thereby facilitating targeted breeding efforts towards horticultural varieties and germplasms with enhanced agronomic traits, nutritional quality and stress resilience. Moreover, interdisciplinary research that integrates omics approaches with fields such as computational biology, bioinformatics, and systems biology, can provide a ‘holistic picture’ on key genes and regulatory pathways e.g. involved in fruit ripening, and disease and abiotic stress tolerance. These studies are essential to develop novel breeding strategies and sustainable agriculture practices.
Omics approaches hold great potential to substantially advance horticultural crop research, including personalized crop breeding tailored to specific environmental conditions, the discovery of novel bioactive compounds, and the optimization of crop management practices for sustainable production systems. In support of the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goal SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), BMC Plant Biology invites submissions to the Collection Omics technologies and applications in horticultural crop research. This Collection focuses on the development and applications of omics technologies in horticultural crops, seeking to highlight the relevance and innovations of (meta-)genomics, (meta-)transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, phenomics and ionomics in horticultural crop biology, as well as how they can be leveraged to improve horticultural crops.
We invite researchers and experts in the field to submit research articles that explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Application and integration of omics technologies (e.g. genomics, meta-genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics) for horticultural crop improvement
- Omics technologies and breeding of horticultural crops
- Enhancing horticultural crops through multi-omics data
- Understanding gene functions and networks in horticultural crops by using omics tools
- Omics technologies and approaches in precision agriculture
- Omics technologies and applications in sustainable agriculture and plant disease control
- Population genomics of horticultural plant pathogens
- Multi-omics approaches applied to plant-pathogen interactions
- Genomics-assisted breeding of horticultural crop varieties for yield improvement and disease tolerance
- Plant phenomics and ionomics applied to horticultural crop varieties (e.g. trait characterization and improvement)
- Integrative and emerging omics methods/approaches applied to horticultural crop research
- Enhancing fruit traits through multi-omics approaches
- Quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for horticultural crop breeding
- Small RNA-omics to study regulatory networks associated with horticultural crop traits
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