Biotechnological Resources for Improvement of Disease Resistance and Nutritional Quality in Staple Crops
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Physiology and Metabolism".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 38245
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant–microbe interaction; plant innate immunity; plant cell-wall integrity; molecular mechanisms regulating danger sensing and signaling; phytohormones in the growth–defense trade-off; crop resistance to biotic stress; sustainable agriculture; molecular genetics; confocal microscopy
Interests: agricultural genetics; starch; genetic biofortification; wheat; functional foods; nutritional quality
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Crop production needs to increase by at least 60% by 2050 to meet the food demand of a growing world population. This task is made more challenging by climate change. It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to succeed with conventional breeding. Biotechnologies represent our best resources in order to make it through. In the last few decades, agricultural biotechnologies have made important progress thanks to the diffusion of fast and efficient new technologies, which offer a broad spectrum of options for understanding plant molecular mechanisms and breeding. This knowledge, along with innovative, fast and precise techniques in molecular genetics, could pave the way for the identification/generation of key resistance traits to be efficiently transferred in crop breeding and applied biotechnology programs for increased science-based sustainability in agriculture.
Section I – Molecular Mechanisms in Plant Resistance to Diseases
Globally, important diseases cause substantial (20–50%) production losses in staple crops, such as wheat, rice, potato, maize and tomato. The consequences of crop diseases also include reduced food quality and safety, due to the presence of hazardous compounds like pesticides and pathogen-derived toxins. Priming and/or boosting plant immune systems may be a sustainable and effective way to save part of the global harvest currently lost to diseases and to prevent food contamination. It is essential to clarify i) how plants sense danger, ii) the molecular mechanisms that activate and modulate immune signaling, and, especially, iii) the role of hormone signaling crosstalk in fine-tuning growth–defense trade-offs in plants challenged by pathogens. This will identify critical events in plant–microbe interactions and, possibly, their key regulatory elements. Such information can be exploited to develop resistant traits in important crops.
Section II – Crop Nutritional Quality
Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) represent one of the biggest challenges currently facing humanity, with an increasing trend in developing countries. Among the 57.7 million deaths that occurred worldwide in 2017, about 41 million (71%) were due to NCDs, principally cardiovascular diseases (43.5%), cancer (22%), chronic respiratory diseases (9.5%) and diabetes (4%). It has been well established that most of above pathologies can be prevented with correct eating habits. Agricultural biotechnology represents a powerful tool to develop new, safe, and nutritious crops, enhancing the nutritional profiles of plants used for food production. Since the inception of golden rice, metabolic engineering approaches have permitted the development of new, more nutritious varieties, with desired traits including increased vitamin, protein, fiber and antioxidant content and altered amino acid and fatty acid profiles. Several studies have demonstrated that these new genotypes represent an important vehicle to prevent common diet-related diseases.
This Special Issue will collect state-of-the-art knowledge on plant–microbe interactions and NCDs. It will also highlight recent progress on different topics related to plant resistance to diseases, as well as applicable biotechnology designed to increase the nutritional value, sustainability and resilience of crops. This will help address the challenging social (increasing food demand with population growth) and environmental (climate change, scarce natural resources) scenario foreseen in the coming decades.
Dr. Daniel-Valentin Savatin
Dr. Francesco Sestili
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- plant–microbe interaction
- plant innate immunity
- plant cell-wall integrity
- molecular mechanisms regulating danger sensing and signaling
- phytohormones in the growth–defense trade-off
- crop resistance to biotic stress
- molecular genetics
- sustainable agriculture
- plant breeding
- metabolic engineering
- genetic biofortification
- improvement of crop nutritional value
- CRISPR/Cas9
- TILLING
- RNA interference
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