Advances in Integrating Genomics and Bioinformatics in the Plant Breeding Pipeline

Haifei Hu, Armin Scheben and David Edwards
Additional contact information
Haifei Hu: School of Biological Sciences and Institute of Agriculture, The University of Western Australia, Perth 6009, Australia
Armin Scheben: School of Biological Sciences and Institute of Agriculture, The University of Western Australia, Perth 6009, Australia
David Edwards: School of Biological Sciences and Institute of Agriculture, The University of Western Australia, Perth 6009, Australia

Agriculture, 2018, vol. 8, issue 6, 1-18

Abstract: With the global human population growing rapidly, agricultural production must increase to meet crop demand. Improving crops through breeding is a sustainable approach to increase yield and yield stability without intensifying the use of fertilisers and pesticides. Current advances in genomics and bioinformatics provide opportunities for accelerating crop improvement. The rise of third generation sequencing technologies is helping overcome challenges in plant genome assembly caused by polyploidy and frequent repetitive elements. As a result, high-quality crop reference genomes are increasingly available, benefitting downstream analyses such as variant calling and association mapping that identify breeding targets in the genome. Machine learning also helps identify genomic regions of agronomic value by facilitating functional annotation of genomes and enabling real-time high-throughput phenotyping of agronomic traits in the glasshouse and in the field. Furthermore, crop databases that integrate the growing volume of genotype and phenotype data provide a valuable resource for breeders and an opportunity for data mining approaches to uncover novel trait-associated candidate genes. As knowledge of crop genetics expands, genomic selection and genome editing hold promise for breeding diseases-resistant and stress-tolerant crops with high yields.

Keywords: breeding; crops; genomics; third generation sequencing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/8/6/75/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/8/6/75/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:8:y:2018:i:6:p:75-:d:149986

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().