The Promise of Agriculture Genomics

With the fact of growing global population, changing climate, and environmental pressure, there is an urgent need to accelerate breeding novel crops with higher production, drought or heat tolerance, and less pesticide usage. Advances in genomics offer the potential to speed up the process of developing crops with promising agronomic traits. Agriculture genomics is the application of genomics in agriculture to improve the productivity and sustainability in crop and livestock production. With the combination of traditional and high-throughput sequencing platforms, there has been a tremendous 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 sequencing and expansion of bioinformatic tools, we are shifting from single gene study to whole-genome analysis, which offers a broader view of how all genes work together. Therefore, this special issue was organized, comprising eleven original research papers and three reviews aimed to highlight recent advances in (1) comparative genomics for plant breeding, (2) transcriptome analysis for plant breeding, (3) genotyping and marker-assisted breeding, and (4) recombinant DNA technology (Figure 1).