A comprehensive review on mutation breeding milestones in cereals: Conventional to advanced molecular approaches to achieve sustainable goals in trait improvement

Abstract

The grass family includes the annual common grasses known as cereals. The 5 main types of cereals are rice, wheat, barley, rye and oats. As a result of their high vitamin (20-80%) and fiber content (90%), these grains can help treat conditions like type II diabetes, complex metabolic syndrome, obesity, gastrointestinal disorders, and high cholesterol. Cereals have inspired a long history of research into their genetics, development, and evolution due to their significance in both economic and scientific terms. They need to be improved because they play a big part in global food production and crop quality is declining. The crop improvement can be done by incorporating desired features from non-adapted landraces/wild resources. That induced mutagenesis has made a significant contribution to crop improvement initiatives by producing mutant varieties with better and desired genetic modifications in the crop plants mainly in agronomically significant features. The mutants produced by the induction of physical and chemical mutagens were highly useful. The notable traits obtained by the induced mutations are semidwarfness and early maturity in rice varieties, disease resistance in barley, salinity, and drought tolerance in wheat, and lodging and disease resistance in oat and rye. In this review, we focused on identifying and developing elite mutants, their genetic function, and their utilization in future breeding programs for various traits in cereal crops.