About this Book

To feed the burgeoning world population, global food production must increase drastically. This is becoming more challenging with the imminent threats of global climate change, especially the incidences of abiotic stresses, such as drought, heat, and salinity are predicted to increase soon. Global climate change may also affect plant-biotic interactions. Additionally, modernization in underdeveloped and developing countries is expected to decrease available land for agricultural usage. Thus, to achieve sustainable agricultural development, it is imperative to produce more food without using additional land and other valuable resources, including water. These necessitates should develop novel, rapid, and robust crop improvement methods that complement traditional plant breeding approaches.

Crop improvement strategies to tackle future challenges necessitate the elucidation of underlying genes and gene regulatory networks. The dwindling cost of next-generation sequencing and the emergence of novel sequencing approaches, such as long-read sequencing technology (e.g., PacBio, Oxford Nanopore, and others) are transforming agricultural research at an unprecedented rate is opening a plethora of opportunities in turbocharging crop improvement initiatives. Recent advances in next-generation sequencing will continue to play a pivotal role in future crop improvement efforts. However, the progress of genomic technologies has not been uniformed world-wide. Thus, it is now relevant to compile a collection of recent advancements in the field of structural, functional, and comparative genomics and its relevance to crop improvement, so that it is disseminated to a broader audience.