Exploring the impact of integrated breeding strategies in enhancing yield, nutritional quality, and stress tolerance in alfalfa

Abstract

Yield, nutrition quality and stress tolerance are important traits for alfalfa improvement perspective. These qualitative and quantitative attributes are changed during its life cycle, no updated studies available on whether and how these traits are influenced by several environmental factors. Therefore, we updated the role of several breeding strategies for developing alfalfa yield, nutritional quality and biotic-abiotic stress tolerance in alfalfa. This study explored integrated breeding approaches would be suitable for the desire traits improvement in alfalfa. Subsequently, the integration of multiomics including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and ionomics may facilitate the agronomic traits improvement and plant fitness in alfalfa. Furthermore, this study proposes integration of omics-system with top-down (phenotype to genotype) and bottom-up (genotype to phenotype) model that can be helpful to characterize or develop desire qualitative and qualitative traits in alfalfa. This updated study might be useful to alfalfa breeders and farmers for improving alfalfa through breeding programs.