Plant Genomics. Chapter 1: Genomics Era for Plants and Crop Species – Advances Made and Needed Tasks Ahead

Abstract

Historically, unintentional plant selection and subsequent crop domestication, coupled with the need and desire to get more food and feed products, have resulted in the continuous development of plant breeding and genetics efforts. The progress made toward this goal elucidated plant genome compositions and led to decoding the full DNA sequences of plant genomes controlling the entire plant life. Plant genomics aims to develop high-throughput genome-wide-scale technologies, tools, and methodologies to elucidate the basics of genetic traits/characteristics, genetic diversities, and by-product production, to understand the phenotypic development throughout plant ontogenesis with genetic by environmental interactions, to map important loci in the genome, and to accelerate crop improvement. Plant genomics research efforts have continuously increased in the past 30 years due to the availability of cost-effective, high-throughput DNA sequencing platforms that resulted in fully sequenced 100 plant genomes with broad implications for every aspect of plant biology research and application. These technological advances, however, also have generated many unexpected challenges and grand tasks ahead. In this introductory chapter, I aimed briefly to summarize some advances made in plant genomics studies in the past three decades, plant genome sequencing efforts, current state-of-the-art technological developments of genomics era, and some of current grand challenges and needed tasks ahead in the genomics and post-genomics era. I also highlighted the related book chapters contributed by different authors in this book.