Integration of multi-omics technologies for crop improvement: Status and prospects

With the rapid development of next-generation sequencing (NGS), multi-omics techniques have been emerging as effective approaches for crop improvement. Here, we focus mainly on addressing the current status and future perspectives toward omics-related technologies and bioinformatic resources with potential applications in crop breeding. Using a large amount of omics-level data from the functional genome, transcriptome, proteome, epigenome, metabolome, and microbiome, clarifying the interaction between gene and phenotype formation will become possible. The integration of multi-omics datasets with pan-omics platforms and systems biology could predict the complex traits of crops and elucidate the regulatory networks for genetic improvement. Different scales of trait predictions and decision-making models will facilitate crop breeding more intelligent. Potential challenges that integrate the multi-omics data with studies of gene function and their network to efficiently select desirable agronomic traits are discussed by proposing some cutting-edge breeding strategies for crop improvement. Multi-omics-integrated approaches together with other artificial intelligence techniques will contribute to broadening and deepening our knowledge of crop precision breeding, resulting in speeding up the breeding process.