Advances in Chickpea Genomic Resources for Accelerating the Crop Improvement

Abstract

Chickpea plays a major role in food and nutritional security worldwide. Its productivity is severely affected by various biotic and abiotic stresses; hence development of stress resilience varieties that can yield higher under stress environment remains the call of the hour. Conventional breeding approaches clubbed with the genome information, commonly known as genomic-assisted breeding (GAB) have the potential to accelerate the crop improvement efforts. In order to deploy the GAB for crop improvement in chickpea, there was need to convert an orphan crop chickpea into the genomic resource-rich crop. Advent of sequencing technology has resulted in reduction of cost and led to development of huge genomic resources in chickpea. A variety of markers have been developed, used for various mapping studies including linkage mapping and association mapping and finally deployed for developing the superior varieties using GAB approached such as marker assisted backcrossing and genomic selection. The chapter reviews the journey of chickpea status from orphan crop with almost no marker resources to a genome resource-rich crop, which are being used for achieving the genetic gains at a momentum.