Journal of Plant Biochemistry and Biotechnology - Special Issue 2023: Next generation sequencing technologies for improvement of crop plants
Title: Next generation sequencing technologies for improvement of crop plants
Proposed Editors:
Rajeev K Varshney
Prof. Rajeev Varshney is a renowned agricultural scientist with over two decades of experience in genomics and molecular breeding. Currently, he holds multiple prestigious positions at Murdoch University in Australia, including Director of the Centre for Crop & Food Innovation, Director of the State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre, and International Chair in Agriculture & Food Security with the Food Futures Institute. Throughout his career, Prof. Varshney has made a significant impact on global food security by creating genomic resources for major "orphan" tropical crops, using these resources to identify genetic loci and candidate genes for drought and pest tolerance in staple crops in sub-Saharan Africa and India, and spearheading international programs that deliver superior crop varieties to some of the world's most impoverished farmers. Prof. Varshney is an accomplished author, with more than 600 publications to his name, and has been recognized as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher for nine consecutive years (2014-2022). He has been honored with elected and honorary fellowships from a dozen academies/ societies and awards from the USA, Germany, China, India, Philippines, and UAE, including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (this opens in a new tab) and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Award (this opens in a new tab) from the government of India.
Vanika Garg
Dr. Vanika Garg is a postdoctoral fellow in computational genomics at the Centre for Crop & Food Innovation in the Food Futures Institute at Murdoch University. She earned her PhD degree in 2019 from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, India, where she studied the stress responses in legume species using multi-omics approaches. With a decade of experience analyzing high-throughput datasets, Vanika's research has resulted in the production of significant genetic resources, including reference genomes, pangenomes, markers, superior haplotypes, and candidate genes, which have had a significant impact on both fundamental and applied research. In recognition of her contributions, she was awarded the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Medal for Young Scientist in 2020. As an early career researcher, she has an impressive publication record with over 35 articles in leading journals such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics, PNAS, Trends in Plant Science, and the Plant Biotechnology Journal.
Roberto Papa
Prof. Roberto Papa is full professor of Agricultural Genetics at Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona (Italy). He has been the director of the Cereal Research Centre of CREA from 2010-2014. He is focusing on population and evolutionary genetics, crop breeding and agroecology toward the understanding of the basis of the adaptive process of wild and domesticated plants and the related implications for the conservation of Plant Genetic Resources. Throughout his career, Prof. Papa contributed to elucidate different aspects related to the evolutionary history of crop species, such as legumes and cereals. By applying genomics approaches and molecular phenotyping (metabolomics and transcriptomic), contributed new knowledge of the effects on the current level and organisation of genetic diversity of crop germplasm and of crucial processes, such as crop domestication and adaptation to different environments with important implications for the management of genetic resources. He also contributed to the identification of genes/ genomic regions that control important agronomic and adaptive traits. He is coordinating the EU INCREASE project and, exploiting a citizen science experiment, he developed the concept of decentralise conservation strategy of Plant Genetic resources.
Background:
The increasing population and unpredictable global climatic changes pose serious threats to crop production and food security. One of the sustainable approaches to achieve food security targets and climate adaptation of crop production systems is to elucidate the genetic basis of adaptation and nutritional traits and use them for crop improvement. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies and data analysis tools have provided an unprecedented opportunity to catalogue genetic variations present in germplasm and translate the genetic and genomic information for faster delivery of improved crop varieties.
The focus of this Special Issue is to provide a platform for the scientific community to share their original research studies revolving around the applications of next-generation sequencing technologies to assist crop improvement programs. Review articles highlighting the state-of-the-art studies and future trends in this area are also welcome. We encourage contributions to the following and related topics:
- Advances in sequencing technologies
- Construction of reference genomes and pangenomes
- Sequencing-based rapid trait mapping approaches such as BSR-Seq, MutMap, QTLseq, and Indel-seq for identification of genomic regions associated with traits of interest
- Sequencing-based germplasm characterization and identification of novel alleles/superior haplotypes
- Population genomic analyses for crop adaptation and domestication traits
- Development and deployment of cost-effective sequencing/genotyping platforms for crop improvement
Keywords: Genome assembly, short and long read sequencing, whole-genome resequencing, trait mapping, plant breeding, crop improvement, genome-wide association studies, quantitative trait loci, genomic prediction
Proposed Publication: September 2023
Last Date of Submission: June 30, 2023