Plant breeding aims to produce plants that have more desirable traits than their predecessors. In general, selection in both agronomic and horticulture crops has been focused on those that are high yielding and disease resistant. Inadvertently, other important food quality traits, including nutrition, have been largely ignored. The development of new crop varieties that have enhanced nutrition provides additional value to both farmers and consumers, though little formal training exists for scientists with this important focus.
There is a critical need to train the next generation plant breeders with interdisciplinary expertise across systems biology. Crop production requires the fundamental understanding of complex biological systems, and the ability to both manage and manipulate to produce a desired result. The integration and translation of the data generated through multi-omics technologies will be critical to provide solutions to crop nutrition enhancement.
A multidisciplinary group of plant and nutrition scientists in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science at The Ohio State University seek to train a cohort of scientists in integration and translation of omics: Trans-omics-assisted plant breeding for enhanced nutrition.