Application of Integrated-Omics Analysis using Allium Bio-Resources to Onion Breeding

Our research via the usage of a complete set of Allium fistulosum - A. cepa monosomic addition lines aims to enable a holistic approach to profile the phytochemical composition as well as its related gene expression of Allium vegetables for plant breeding studies, through collaborative development of resources for metabolomics-high throughput chemical profiling by mass spectrometry, together with transcriptmics assay metadata by RNA-Seq. An omics approach will be used to characterize variation in these unique genetic stocks, developing capability and plant materials to support metabolomics-informed plant breeding studies of whole plants, as well as enabling detection of associations between phytochemical content, gene expression and specific genome regions. The knowledge and technologies will be applicable for targeting breeding towards enhanced functionality as well as disease resistance.