Genomics-Enabled Breeding for Heat and Drought Stress Tolerance in Crop Plants

Abstract

AbstractAmong abiotic stresses, heat and drought stresses present a considerable threat to the global food production. Cereals and grain legumes provide major dietary demands worldwide but in changing climate scenario enhancing food production for feeding evergrowing population is very challenging. Therefore, breeding cultivars with drought and heat stress tolerance traits are going to be a challenging task in the coming decades. Plants respond to heat or drought stress by triggering a cascade of molecular events and counter the stress by switching on various stress-responsive genes. However, drought and heat tolerance traits are very complex and poorly understood mechanisms and substantial G × E and epistatic effects offer major bottlenecks to the genetic gains against both stresses. Therefore, in current situation attention should be given to the rapid and precise introgression of heat and drought tolerance-related gene(s)/QTLs to the susceptible cultivars through integration of molecular breeding tools. Innovative techniques like genomic selection (GS) and genome wide association study (GWAS) are gaining importance as they capture the quantitative variation underlying abiotic stress tolerance and provide a great impetus to the progress of breeding for heat and drought tolerance.KeywordsToleranceMolecular markersQTLGenomicsGenomic selection