Browsing by Author "Almalki, M"

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    Genomics-Assisted Breeding: A Powerful Breeding Approach for Improving Plant Growth and Stress Resilience
    (2024-05) Tyagi, A; Mir, Z; Almalki, M; Deshmukh, R; Ali, s
    Climate change biotic and abiotic stressors lead to unpredictable crop yield losses, threaten ing global food and nutritional security. In the past, traditional breeding has been instrumental in fulfilling food demand; however, owing to its low efficiency, dependence on environmental condi tions, labor intensity, and time consumption, it fails to maintain global food demand in the face of a rapidly changing environment and an expanding population. In this regard, plant breeders need to integrate multiple disciplines and technologies, such as genotyping, phenotyping, and envirotyping, in order to produce stress-resilient and high-yielding crops in a shorter time. With the technological revolution, plant breeding has undergone various reformations, for example, artificial selection breed ing, hybrid breeding, molecular breeding, and precise breeding, which have been instrumental in developing high-yielding and stress-resilient crops in modern agriculture. Marker-assisted selection, also known as marker-assisted breeding, emerged as a game changer in modern breeding and has evolved over time into genomics-assisted breeding (GAB). It involves genomic information of crops to speed up plant breeding in order to develop stress-resilient and high-yielding crops. The combination of speed breeding with genomic and phenomic resources enabled the identification of quantitative trait loci (QTLs)/genes quickly, thereby accelerating crop improvement efforts. In this review, we provided an update on rapid advancement in molecular plant breeding, mainly GAB, for efficient crop improvements. We also highlighted the importance of GAB for improving biotic and abiotic stress tolerance as well as crop productivity in different crop systems. Finally, we discussed how the expansion of GAB to omics-assisted breeding (OAB) will contribute to the development of future resilient crops.
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    Saffron, a Potential Bridge between Nutrition and Disease Therapeutics: Global Health Challenges and Therapeutic Opportunities
    (2024-05) Mir, R; Tyagi, A; Hussain, S; Almalki, M; Zeyad, M; Deshmukh, R; Ali, S
    Plants are an important source of essential bioactive compounds that not only have a beneficial role in human health and nutrition but also act as drivers for shaping gut microbiome. However, the mechanism of their functional attributes is not fully understood despite their signif icance. One such important plant is Crocus sativus, also known as saffron, which possesses huge medicinal, nutritional, and industrial applications like food and cosmetics. The importance of this plant is grossly attributed to its incredible bioactive constituents such as crocins, crocetin, safranal, picrocrocin, and glycosides. These bioactive compounds possess a wide range of therapeutic activities against multiple human ailments. Since a huge number of studies have revealed negative unwanted side effects of modern-day drugs, the scientific communities at the global level are investigating a large number of medicinal plants to explore natural products as the best alternatives. Taken into consideration, the available research findings indicate that saffron has a huge scope to be further explored to establish alternative natural-product-based drugs for health benefits. In this review, we are providing an update on the role of bioactive compounds of saffron as therapeutic agents (human disorders and antimicrobial activity) and its nutritional values. We also highlighted the role of omics and metabolic engineering tools for increasing the content of key saffron bioactive molecules for its mass production. Finally, pre-clinical and clinical studies seem to be necessary to establish its therapeutic potential against human diseases.