Current Status and Prospects of Genomic Selection in Legumes

Abstract

Legumes play a major role in food and nutritional security across the world. The current rate of genetic gains in legume breeding programs is not enough to meet the food and nutritional requirement of an ever increasing global population. To feed this growing population, it is essential to enhance the rate of genetic gains for increased productivity of these legumes. Genomics tools have great potential in developing improved cultivars faster and more precisely by deploying modern breeding approaches. Marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC) and marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) approaches have been successfully deployed in several legume crops for improving traits with simple genetic behaviour. However, it is difficult to address the complex traits using MABC and MARS as several large and small effect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) are involved in their expression. Genomic selection (GS) has potential to capture small and large effect genetic factors and deal with the complex traits. Over the last decade, large scale genomic resources have been developed in majority of the legume crops, which provide a perfect platform to deploy genome-wide information in selecting breeding material for enhancing the rate of genetic gain. Many legume breeders have already took initiatives towards deploying GS breeding by developing training populations, standardizing the GS models, studying effect of marker density, size of training population, and genotype and environment interaction. This chapter presents an overview on the current status of GS and presents the future prospects of its deployment in some legume breeding programs.