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Dear Colleagues,

The growing human population and climate change are imposing unprecedented challenges for the global food supply. To cope with these pressures, crop improvement demands enhancing agronomical important traits such as yield, resistance, and nutritional value by pivoting direct and indirect genetically assisted approaches. The development of last-generation high-throughput screening technologies, known as omics, promises to speed up trait improvement in plants. Large-scale techniques such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics have already retrieved large volumes of data as never before that, merged through bioinformatics and machine-learning approaches, are helping us understand the mechanisms behind crop features. Omics datasets are not only being generated from tissues of a single genotype but are also permeating macro-scale interactions to deepen our knowledge of crop behavior across the microbial and environmental continua. However, despite these massive technological and computational developments, cohesive efforts to combine contrasting omics studies within common pathways and cellular networks of crop systems are in their infancy. Therefore, this Special Issue envisions offering updated views on multidimensional large-scale omics-based approaches. Specifically, we welcome studies that explore the uses of the omics paradigm, and their integration through trans-disciplinary bioinformatics, as tools to improve qualitative and quantitative traits in crop species.

Dr. Roxana Yockteng
Dr. Andrés J. Cortés
Dr. María Ángeles Castillejo
Guest Editors

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Related Special Issue

Published Papers (1 paper)

Research

12 pages, 5079 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Transcriptome Analysis of Potential Regulatory Genes under Chemical Doubling in Maize Haploids

by Youqiang Li, Penglin Zhan, Rumin Pu, Wenqi Xiang, Xin Meng, Shiqi Yang, Gaojiao Hu, Shuang Zhao, Jialong Han, Chao Xia, Hai Lan, Qingjun Wang, Jingwei Li, Yanli Lu, Yongtao Yu, Changjian Liao, Gaoke Li and Haijian Lin

Agronomy 2024, 14(3), 624; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/agronomy14030624 - 20 Mar 2024

Viewed by 518

Abstract

Maize is one of the most successful crops with regard to the utilization of heterosis. The haploid induction technique is one of the fastest methods to obtain pure maize material at the present stage. However, the molecular mechanism of haploid doubling is rarely reported. In this study, we treated B73 and ZNC442 haploid young shoots with colchicine for 0 h, 6.2 h, and 10 h, and analyzed the differentially expressed genes (DEGs). We found that colchicine treatment for 6.2 h and 10 h compared to 0 h resulted in a total of 4868 co-DEGs. GO enrichment analysis and KEGG metabolic pathway analysis found significantly enriched 282 GO terms and 31 significantly pathways, respectively. Additionally, The GO term and KEGG pathway genes of spindle, cytoskeleton, microtubules and nuclear division were selected for analysis, and three candidate genes were screened by taking intersections. Zm00001d033112, Zm00001d010525, and Zm00001d043386 were annotated as kinesin-associated protein 13, kinesin-like protein KIN-10C, and kinesin light-chain LC6, respectively. The real-time fluorescence quantification (RT-PCR) results revealed that Zm00001d033112, Zm00001d010525, and Zm00001d043386 had the same trends as RNA-seq. Interestingly, Zm00001d033112 is homologous gene AT3G20150 in Arabidopsis, which was involved in the regulation of chromosome movement and mitotic spindle assembly. Our study suggests that kinesin genes may play an important role in doubling chromosomes, thus providing valuable information for future studies on the molecular mechanisms of chromosome doubling in maize. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Omics Approaches for Crop Improvement—Volume II)

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