Omics in Horticultural Crops

Dear Colleagues,

Horticulture is the science and art of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants, or, alternatively, horticulture is the branch of plant agriculture dealing with garden crops, generally fruits, vegetables, and ornamental plants. Horticultural crops include important species such as Solanum lycopersicum (tomato), Solanum tuberosum (potato), Solanum melongena (eggplant), Capsicum spp. (chili peppers), Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco), and Petunia, all of them belonging to the Solanaceae family, which comprises approximately 100 genera and 2500 species. The Cucurbitaceae family consists of 101 genera and 965 species, of which Cucumis melo (melon), Cucumis sativus (cucumber), Cucurbita pepo (squash), and Citrullus lanatus (watermelon) are maybe the most relevant. The Brassicaceae family includes 372 genera and 4060 species, with Brassica oleracea (cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli), Brassica napus (rapeseed), Raphanus sativus (common radish), and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana as representatives.

Some other horticultural families of importance are Umbelliferae (carrots, celery, and parsley), Amaryllidaceae (garlic, onion, shallots, and asparagus), Rosaceae (strawberry, cherry, raspberry, blackberry, pear, apple, and plum), Asteraceae or Compositae (lettuce, artichoke, chicory, and chamomile), Chenopodiaceae (spinach, and beets), Fabaceae (bean, pea, lentil, soybean, fava bean, and peanut), Liliaceae (important for its many garden ornamentals and houseplants), among others. In addition to their economic value, members of all these families have been model systems in plant biology research to study plant development, fruit development, and defense responses to different environmental stresses.

Omics represent powerful tools to investigate fundamental aspects of plant biology to reveal diverse molecular biology mechanisms involving not only the genomes, the expression of genes, or the encoded proteins, but also the ultimate metabolite products. All omics approaches are currently applied to horticultural crop breeding and improvement as well as strategies to investigate different plant aspects, such as changes in gene expression during growth, development, ripening, and senescence, and to study responses of plants to environmental stresses, changes in the quality of tubers, roots, bulbs, flowers, or fruits after harvesting, and even under storage conditions (postharvest).

This Special Issue of Plants aims to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the diverse molecular biology aspects of horticultural crops through integrative omics advances

Dr. Octavio Martínez
Prof. Dr. Neftalí Ochoa-Alejo
Guest Editors

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• horticultural crops
• vegetables
• fruits
• flowers
• ornamentals
• genomics
• transcriptomics
• proteomics
• metabolomics