QTLian breeding for climate resilience in cereals: progress and prospects

Abstract

The ever-rising population of the twenty-first century together with the prevailing challenges, such as deteriorating quality of arable land and water, has placed a big challenge for plant breeders to satisfy human needs for food under erratic weather patterns. Rice, wheat, and maize are the major staple crops consumed globally. Drought, waterlogging, heat, salinity, and mineral toxicity are the key abiotic stresses drastically affecting crop yield. Conventional plant breeding approaches towards abiotic stress tolerance have gained success to limited extent, due to the complex (multigenic) nature of these stresses. Progress in breeding climate-resilient crop plants has gained momentum in the last decade, due to improved understanding of the physiochemical and molecular basis of various stresses. A good number of genes have been characterized for adaptation to various stresses. In the era of novel molecular markers, mapping of QTLs has emerged as viable solution for breeding crops tolerant to abiotic stresses. Therefore, molecular breeding-based development and deployment of high-yielding climate-resilient crop cultivars together with climate-smart agricultural practices can pave the path to enhanced crop yields for smallholder farmers in areas vulnerable to the climate change. Advances in fine mapping and expression studies integrated with cheaper prices offer new avenues for the plant breeders engaged in climate-resilient plant breeding, and thereby, hope persists to ensure food security in the era of climate change.