Reaping the Benefits of Next-generation Sequencing Technologies for Crop Improvement — Solanaceae

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies make possible the sequencing of the whole genome of a species decoding a complete gene catalogue and transcriptome to al‐ low the study of expression pattern of entire genes. The huge data generated through whole genome and transcriptome sequencing not only provide a basis to study variation at gene sequence (such as single-nucleotide polymorphism and InDels) and expression level but also help to understand the evolutionary relationship between different crop species. Furthermore, NGS technologies have made possible the quick correlations of phenotypes with genotypes in different crop species, thereby increasing the precision of crop improvement. The Solanaceae family represents the third most economically impor‐ tant family after grasses and legumes due to high nutritional components. The current advances in NGS technology and their application in Solanaceae crops made several pro‐ gresses in the identification of genes responsible for economically important traits, devel‐ opment of molecular markers, and understanding the genome organization and evolution in Solanaceae crops. The combination of high-throughput NGS technologies with conventional crop breeding has been shown to be promising in the Solanaceae trans‐ lational genomics research. As a result, NGS technologies has been seen to be adopted in a large scale to study the molecular basis of fruit and tuber development, disease resist‐ ance, and increasing quantity and quality of crop production.