Mining Favorable Alleles for Crop Yield, Biotic and Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Dear Colleagues,

With the global population increase, we are facing great challenges in the provision of sufficient grains to feed the world due to a decrease in arable land, inadequate water resources, and frequent natural disasters. Climatic changes lead to rising temperatures, more frequent floods, more diseases and pest outbreaks, and frequent abiotic stresses such as drought, saline, and alkaline stresses. Crop production under biotic and abiotic stresses is becoming increasingly vulnerable and unsustainable. In addressing these challenges within a global warming environment and ensuring food security, crop breeding has assumed paramount significance. In recent years, significant advances have been made in identifying favorable alleles for yield and its components, as well as tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. This has been accomplished through advanced genetic methodologies, encompassing reverse genetics, forward genetics (including genetic linkage mapping and genome-wide association mapping), and high-throughput phenotyping platforms. These achievements provide a robust foundation for transferring or pyramiding a series of favorable allelic variations that are usually dispersed in different genetic resources via genomic selection and other state-of-the-art breeding technologies such as precise genome editing and gene transformation.

Hence, the main aim of the proposed Special Issue is to gather research methods, innovations, and knowledge in the areas of mining and utilization of favorable alleles for yield and its components, and biotic and abiotic stress tolerance in crops.

We invite researchers to contribute their original research papers and reviews on the following themes. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Candidate gene and favorable allele identification for yield, biotic and abiotic stress tolerance;
• Favorable haplotype-based molecular breeding;
• Genome editing for yield and stress tolerance improvement;
• Introgressing and pyramiding favorable genes via genomic selection.

Dr. Jianlong Xu
Prof. Dr. Meixue Zhou
Guest Editors

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• high yield
• biotic and abiotic stress tolerance
• favorable gene editing
• favorable gene transformation
• genomic selection
• favorable allele or haplotype identification
• pyramiding breeding by molecular technology