Genetic and Epigenetic Regulation of Disease Resistance in Horticultural Plants

The horticultural plant comprises a large collection of plants that contribute significantly to the food, fuels, and beauty of living places and ecosystems. Horticultural plants are mainly cultivated in solar greenhouses and plastic greenhouses, with large temperature differences, high humidity, and serious disease. The development of the horticultural industry is largely limited by disease and excessive pesticide application. The most effective strategies for preventing diseases in horticultural plants include selecting disease-resistant germplasm and breeding disease-resistant varieties. Therefore, it is crucial to identify new candidate genes and explore the molecular mechanisms underlying disease resistance in horticultural plants. With the rapid development of third-generation sequencing techniques, the high-quality, even telomere-to-telomere, reference genomes of many horticultural plants have become available. Integrated analysis of multi-omics data using bioinformatics tools has greatly helped us to better understand the evolutionary histories of horticultural plant species and provide genomics resources for molecular studies on disease resistance traits. Understanding and exploiting the horticultural plant's genetics and epigenetics will help us make the genetic improvement to horticultural plants.

This Research Topic aims to focus on the genetic and epigenetic regulation of disease resistance in horticultural plants. We hope to find the novel genes and then identify their functions and regulatory pathways in classic genes to provide abundant targets for the genetic improvement of horticultural plants.

We will consider Original Research and Review papers covering recent, promising, and novel research trends in the field of genetics and epigenetics of disease resistance in horticultural plants. Areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
• Development of quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to understand the genetic basis of disease resistance in horticultural plants
• The epigenetic regulation of disease resistance in horticultural plants: including DNA modification, RNA modification, Histone modification
• Development and application of genetic and epigenetic strategies for horticultural plant disease resistance improvement
• Multi-omics dealing with data sets of genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, epigenome, and/or microbiome
• Perspectives, opinions, and reviews in horticultural plant disease resistance