Genomic Designing of Climate-Smart Vegetable Crops

This book reviews modern strategies in the breeding of vegetables in the era of global warming. Agriculture is facing numerous challenges in the 21st century, as it has to address food, nutritional, energy and environmental security. Future vegetable varieties must be adaptive to the varying scenarios of climate change, produce higher yields of high- quality food and feed and have multiple uses. To achieve these goals, it is imperative to employ modern tools of molecular breeding, genetic engineering and genomics for ‘precise’ plant breeding to produce ‘designed’ vegetable varieties adaptive to climate change.

This book is of interest to scientists working in the fields of plant genetics, genomics, breeding, biotechnology, and in the disciplines of agronomy and horticulture.

Prof. Chittaranjan Kole is an internationally reputed scientist with an illustrious professional career spanning over thirty-three years and original contributions in the fields of plant genomics, biotechnology and molecular breeding leading to the publication of more than 160 quality research articles and reviews. He has edited over 90 books for the leading publishers of the world including Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor and Francis Group. His scientific contributions and editing acumen have been appreciated by seven Nobel Laureates including Profs. Norman Borlaug, Arthur Kornberg, Werner Arber, Phillip Sharp, Günter Blobel, Lee Hartwell and Roger Kornberg. He has been honored with a number of Fellowships, Honorary Fellowships, and national and international awards including the Outstanding Crop Scientist award conferred by the International Crop Science Society. He has served at all prestigious positions in academia including as Vice-Chancellor of BC Agricultural university, Project Coordinator of Indo-Russian Center of Biotechnology in India; and Director of Research of the Institute of Nutraceutical Research at Clemson University, in USA. He worked also in the Pennsylvania State University and Clemson University as Visiting Professor in USA. Recently, he has been awarded with the Raja Ramanna Fellow by the Department of Energy, Government of India. He is also heading the International Climate-Resilient Crop Genomics Consortium and International consortium for Phytomedomics and Nutriomics as their founding Principal Coordinator.