Marker-Assisted Breeding As Next-Generation Strategy

Dear Colleagues,

Plant fiber is obtained from seeds, fruits, stems, and leaves, of plants. It has the advantages of degradability and environmental friendliness. Plant fiber is not only an important natural material in the textile industry, but also widely used in other industrial fields, including materials, environment, military, aerospace, and automobile manufacturing. However, the current output and quality of plant fiber cannot meet this diverse demand. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to enlarge the planting of multi-purpose fiber crops and to improve plant fiber quality to meet the above demand. Systematically elucidating the molecular mechanisms of plant fiber development and fiber quality formation is of great significance for making full use of plant fiber-related gene resources, and improving plant fiber yield and fiber quality. In the past two decades, advances in understanding plant genomes, including reading (various omics technologies) and interpretation (deep learning for big data), have provided valuable genetic resources for future plant fiber molecular breeding, including marker-assisted selection (MAS), transgenic technology and CRISPR-cas9. MAS has emerged as a potential tool, which can achieve desirable results in plant breeding projects with the help of molecular markers, and improve the traits of interest in a short time.

This Special Issue aims at bringing out state-of-the-art research progress on “Marker-assisted Breeding as Next-Generation Strategy for Genetic Improvement of Plant Fiber”. We welcome reviews, research articles, short letters, and reports that use multi-omics and functional verification technologies, such as QTL/gene mapping, GWAS, RNA-seq, proteomics, metabolomics, genetic transformation, and genome editing, for uncovering the molecular mechanism of fiber development and fiber quality formation. We also encourage the submission of research papers with significant innovative technologies and breeding applications related to MAS.

Dr. Wankui Gong
Dr. Jun Zhang
Dr. Zemao Yang
Guest Editors

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• Marker-assisted selection (MAS)
• quantitative trait locus (QTL)
• fiber development
• genetics
• multi-omics
• functional genomics
• candidate gene identification