ZJU Scholar invited to reflect on past and future milestones of plant breeding in honor of 25th anniversary of Trends in Plant Science
In honor of the 25th anniversary of Trends, one of their series journals, Trends in Plant Science, invited 10 distinguished scientists from all over the world to reflect on the changes that have occurred within the field of plant breeding during the past 25 years, as well as to contemplate what the future might hold. FAN Longjiang, a professor at the Zhejiang University College of Agriculture & Biotechnology, is one of them.
In the TrendsTalk special issue — “Feeding the World: The Future of Plant Breeding”, Prof. FAN Longjiang talked about the contributions of genomes to plant breeding and the future development. “Over the past 25 years, great advances on sequencing technology have ushered a new era of plant breeding. After the release of the first plant genome 20 years ago, a myriad of crop genomes of increasing complexity and size have been sequenced. Understanding the origin and domestication history of modern crops is also central to the identification of useful genetic resources for crop improvement. This can be achieved by genomic studies of populations and pedigree of crops and their wild relatives. In the next 25 years, one of the most exciting challenges in plant breeding will be synthetic breeding by genome design based on our understanding of genome evolution and gene-trait associations. It can be expected that the de novo breeding approach will totally change the landscape of plant breeding,” commented FAN Longjiang.
Trends is a portfolio of 16 reviews journals dedicated to keeping the readers up-to-date on the most recent advances in fields across the life, physical, and medical sciences.