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Title: PREFACE: PHYSIOLOGY, GENOMICS AND CROP RESPONSE TO GLOBAL CHANGE

Author
item White, Jeffrey
item McMaster, Gregory
item EDMEADES, GREG - PIONEER HI-BRED INTL IA

Submitted to: Field Crops Research
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 5/18/2004
Publication Date: 7/1/2004
Citation: White, J.W., Mcmaster, G.S., Edmeades, G. 2004. Preface: physiology, genomics and crop response to global change. Field Crops Research. 90(1):1-3.

Interpretive Summary: Research to sustain crop production faces major challenges as fossil fuel usage, forest clearing, demographic growth, natural processes, and other forces drive fundamental changes in production environments across the globe. This short preface introduces a special issue of Field Crops Research that considers opportunities for applying genomics to research on impacts of global change processes on agriculture. The eleven research papers included in the special issue demonstrate that there is increasing potential for genomics research to be applied in efforts to characterize how crops respond to global change but realizing this potential requires greater collaboration among field-oriented physiologists and genomics specialists. The examples provided by the papers should stimulate greater collaboration among disciplines, leading to more rapid advances in research on how to adapt crop management to global change. This, in turn, should help protect the agricultural sector from impacts of global change, helping to ensure sustainable production in coming decades.

Technical Abstract: Research to sustain crop production faces major challenges as fossil fuel usage, forest clearing, demographic growth, natural processes, and other forces drive fundamental changes in agricultural environments across the globe. This short preface introduces a special issue of Field Crops Research that examines opportunities for applying genomics to research on impacts of global change processes on agriculture. Eleven research papers considered themes ranging from how genomics can improve the efficiency of breeding for abiotic factors such as heat, drought and elevated CO2 to whether the current "carbon centric" emphasis of global change research is meaningful when crop growth and yield are often limited by a complex of soil constraints. The authors were challenged to answer such questions as whether bioinformatic tools can provide information whether plants have CO2 receptors that impart a growth regulatory role to CO2, or what insights can physiology provide on genetic mechanisms of down-regulation or inhibition of photosynthesis under elevated CO2 or heat stress that could be studied further using functional genomics?