Omics Technologies and Crop Improvement

Increased world population, decreased water supply, and climate change all put stresses on the global food supply. An exploration of the challenges and possible solutions to improve yields of the main crops, such as cereals, roots, tubers, and grasses, Omics Technologies and Crop Improvement reviews data on food sciences and omics. The book covers modern omic technologies such as nutrigenomics and metagenomics. It provides a detailed examination of how omics can help crop science and horticulture and introduces the benefits of using these technologies to increase crop yields and other features such as resistance and nutritional values.

The book highlights crop improvements such as increased yield, drought resistance, disease resistance, and value-added performance through a non-transgenic format. It explores how the different omics technologies, especially the most recent ones (proteomics, metabolomics, nutrigenomics, ionomics, and metagenomics) would be used to improve the quantitative and qualitative features of crop plants. Topics covered include:

Advances in omics for improved fresh crops

Transcriptome analyses on the drought response using drought tolerant near isogenic lines

Metabolite profiling that reveals different effects of nitrogen amendments on vegetables

Omics technology application to forage crops improvement

Secondary metabolites and plant tissue culture

RNAi technology and crop improvement

Gene expression analysis methods with NGS data

Web database resources and crops improvement

Gene Expression Networks (GEN) in crops

Specific crop improvement (papaya, wheat, coffee, potato, and more)

With contributions from pioneering researchers from twelve countries, the book presents a broad view of how omics would help crop science and horticulture meet the challenges of a shrinking global food