Inaugural Editorial

Horticulture is one of the oldest agricultural practices, dating back to the beginning of human civilization when humans collected naturally grown fruits, brought them to their settlements and purposely cultivated them. Horticulture today plays crucial roles in our lives. Fruits, nuts and vegetables are important foods that supplement staples like rice and corn and provide many essential nutrients. Ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers are essential for beautifying our living places. Fresh-cut flowers are associated with public congratulatory events like business openings and personal celebratory occasions like weddings, anniversaries and holidays. Teas, herbs and specialty local fruits are inseparable parts of cultures and religious traditions. Increasingly, horticulture is being used in combatting nutritional imbalance, obesity and mental health issues, providing educational materials for teaching biological sciences, remediating environmental disorders, and conserving biodiversity and environmental integrity. Horticulture as a research subfield of agriculture and plant biology began thousands of years ago when our ancestors intentionally propagated selected fruit trees by cuttings and grafting, or by planting seeds from selected fruits and vegetables. Horticultural research today shares many aspects with agronomic crop research and general botany since it follows the same biological principles and uses the same experimental tools. Horticultural research often has the same goals as other agronomic plant research, such as breeding crops for greater yield and higher quality in terms of longer shelf life and richer nutrients, and understanding the fundamental processes of plant life such as development, reproduction , adaptation to diverse environments and resistance to diseases, insects and abiotic stresses. On the other hand, because horticultural crops, frequently considered 'minor' or specialty crops, are very diverse and possess many unique characteristics not found in agronomic crops, horticultural research has not always been fully appreciated or understood by other research communities. For decades, basic research in horticulture has been considered to lag behind that in general plant biology and agronomy. This remains true in many areas due to certain unique hurtles, such as long life cycles, large plant sizes and lack of genetic database resources. However, the field of basic horticultural research has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last 30 years, attributable to revolutionary technologies like genetic engineering and genome sequencing. Never before has basic research in horticulture been more exciting in terms of revealing the mechanisms underlining the 'beauty' and function of dazzling varieties of horticulture crops. The rapid progress and mushrooming of novel discoveries call for …