Genomics Era for Plants and Crop Species – Advances Made and Needed Tasks Ahead

Historically, unintentional plant selection and subsequent crop domestication, coupled with the need and desire to get more food and feed products, have resulted in the continu‐ ous development of plant breeding and genetics efforts. The progress made toward this goal elucidated plant genome compositions and led to decoding the full DNA sequences of plant genomes controlling the entire plant life. Plant genomics aims to develop highthroughput genome-wide-scale technologies, tools, and methodologies to elucidate the ba‐ sics of genetic traits/characteristics, genetic diversities, and by-product production; to understand the phenotypic development throughout plant ontogenesis with genetic by en‐ vironmental interactions; to map important loci in the genome; and to accelerate crop im‐ provement. Plant genomics research efforts have continuously increased in the past 30 years due to the availability of cost-effective, high-throughput DNA sequencing platforms that resulted in fully sequenced 100 plant genomes with broad implications for every as‐ pect of plant biology research and application. These technological advances, however, al‐ so have generated many unexpected challenges and grand tasks ahead. In this introductory chapter, I aimed briefly to summarize some advances made in plant genomics studies in the past three decades, plant genome sequencing efforts, current state-of-the-art technological developments of genomics era, and some of current grand challenges and needed tasks ahead in the genomics and post-genomics era. I also highlighted the related book chapters contributed by different authors in this book.