Crop Improvement for Climate Resilience and Global Food Security

Dear Colleagues,

Crop improvement is the process of developing new plant varieties or improving existing ones with desirable traits to increase yield, improve quality, enhance resistance to diseases and pests, and/or improve tolerance to environmental stress. This process involves several techniques and approaches such as conventional breeding, genetic engineering, and biotechnology. Conventional breeding is a process that involves crossing two different plants with desirable traits to create a new variety with the desired characteristics. The process can take many years, and it involves several steps, such as selecting the best parent plants, crossing them to create new hybrids, and testing the offspring to select those with the desired traits. Modern biotechnological interventions involve the manipulation of genes in plants to introduce desirable traits or remove undesirable ones. This process involves the use of techniques such as gene editing, where specific genes are modified or removed, and gene transfer, where genes from one species are transferred to another to introduce desirable traits. Further, frequently used techniques such as plant tissue culture enables the propagation of large numbers of plants from a small amount of tissue and genetic markers, which can be used to identify and select plants with desirable traits. Crop improvement is essential to ensure food security, improve the livelihoods of farmers, and promote sustainable agriculture. By developing new varieties that are more productive, disease resistant, and tolerant to environmental stress, crop improvement can help address the challenges of increasing demand for food and limited resources. 

This Special Issue titled ‘Crop improvement’ will cover the following topics:

1. Impact of frequently changing climatic global conditions on crop production.
2. Impact of abiotic stresses on global agriculture.
3. Impact of biotic stresses on global agriculture.
4. Using conventional breeding approaches to produce new plant varieties with high yield and stress tolerance against biotic and abiotic stresses.
5. Using hybridization techniques in commercial crop production to produce plants that are more vigorous, disease resistant, and productive.
6. Application of mutation breeding (radiation or chemicals) to induce mutations with new and desirable traits for the development of new plant varieties.
7. Plant tissue culture to propagate plants with desirable traits or to produce disease-free plants.
8. Marker-assisted selection (MAS) to identify specific genes or genetic regions associated with desirable traits. 
9. Genetic engineering approaches for biotic and abiotic stress tolerance.
10. Metabolic engineering approaches.
11. Omics approaches (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) for crop improvement.
12. Computational biology approaches for understanding the importance of specific gene families.
13. Next-generation sequencing of plants and pathogens.
14. Application of biostimulants for growth enhancement and stress tolerance.
15. Application of foliar spray of nanofertilizer for growth improvement.

Dr. J. C. Luis Jorge
Guest Editor

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