Genetics of Fiber Crops

Dear Colleagues,

Fiber crops mainly include cotton, jute, flax, ramie, hemp, kenaf, sisal, and so on. They are cultivated for natural fiber production, which is required for producing economic and eco-friendly products. Classical genetics was the central point for improving fiber crops through traditional breeding approaches notably phenotypic-based selection and crossing plants in the field. With the integration of next-generation high throughput techniques for sequencing in life science in recent decades, the application of forward or reverse genetics including QTL mapping and cloning, genomics, marker-aided selection, gene editing, and others have been accomplished. Reference genomes for major fiber crops including cotton, jute, kenaf, ramie, hemp, and flax were released, which helped scientists to explore function genomics, genomic resequencing, and identification of genes linked with desired agronomic traits, and molecular markers such as SNPs, and InDels. Accordingly, marker-centered breeding techniques have been established in fiber crops. Novel technologies remarkably GAB (genome aided breeding) and gene-editing techniques such as with CRISPR Cas9 have been established. A single plant genomics has shown disadvantages of not providing a compressive genetic diversity within a species, hence the adoption of pangenomics, which represent a repertoire diversity of a species or family. And future studies in fiber crops will integrate pangenomes for genomic selection.

Prof. Dr. Liwu Zhang
Prof. Dr. Haseena Khan
Dr. Gea Guerriero
Guest Editors

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• fiber crops
• genetics
• genomics
• next-generation sequencing
• gene editing
• breeding-by-design