Abstract
Breeding science has immensely contributed to the global food security. Several varieties and hybrids in different food crops including maize have been released through conventional breeding. The ever growing population, decreasing agricultural land, lowering water table, changing climate, and other variables pose tremendous challenge to the researchers to improve the production and productivity of food crops. Drought is one of the major problems to sustain and improve the productivity of food crops including maize in tropical and subtropical production systems. With advent of novel genomics and breeding tools, the way of doing breeding has been tremendously changed in the last two decades. Drought tolerance is a combination of several component traits with a quantitative mode of inheritance. Rapid DNA and RNA sequencing tools and high-throughput SNP genotyping techniques, trait mapping, functional characterization, genomic selection, rapid generation advancement, and other tools are now available to understand the genetics of drought tolerance and to accelerate the breeding cycle. Informatics play complementary role by managing the big-data generated from the large-scale genomics and breeding experiments. Genome editing is the latest technique to alter specific genes to improve the trait expression. Integration of novel genomics, next-generation breeding, and informatics tools will accelerate the stress breeding process and increase the genetic gain under different production systems.
Highlights
Increasing the food production is a challenge to feed the global population that is expected to reach about 9 billion by 2050
Breeding for climate-resilient drought tolerant maize is important owing to changing climatic conditions
Several morpho-physiological traits have been reported for drought tolerance in maize
Summary
Increasing the food production is a challenge to feed the global population that is expected to reach about 9 billion by 2050. Breeding for drought tolerance specific to the target production systems would provide more dividends since the systems decide the type of traits to be phenotyped to breed effective maize hybrids and to maximize the genetic gain. Phenotyping a large set of genetically diverse maize germplasm under drought stress would be helpful to understand the variability as well as to develop a core set.
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