Unveiling of allelic variants of crop plants from natural populations through allele mining strategies

Abstract

Currently crop production is affected by several emerging biotic and abiotic stresses that are ultimately insufficient to meet the food requirement of the growing human population. Plant genetic resources are a treasure for many novel alleles that play an important role in adjusting crop genotypes under the changing climatic landscape. Germplasm of natural populations and crop species around the world contain rare alleles that are no longer present in our current breeding line, therefore a large opportunity to characterize these genetic resources at the molecular level and identify key alleles that provide resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Allele mining is a recent and promising technology to identify the natural allelic variation at candidate genes controlling important agronomic traits that has great role in improvement of crop species. This approach proved its potential applications in plant breeding by detecting the new superior alleles for various traits like disease resistance, drought tolerance, salinity tolerance, quality etc in many crops. Therefore, allele mining can be efficiently used to unclose this hidden allelic variation in natural population as well as in germplasm collection.