Genomics-Assisted Breeding: A Powerful Breeding Approach for Improving Plant Growth and Stress Resilience
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Date
2024-05
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Abstract
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.