Omics and Plant Genetic Resources: Towards Mining Potential Genes

Abstract

Conservation of plant genetic resources is critical for increasing the resilience and agricultural production system to meet the increasing demand for future world food security. Ex situ and in situ conservation of plant genetic resources are particularly important for their efficient utilization in crop improvement programmes. Different types of gene pool techniques are important for restoration of gene pool of crops. Omics can enable further expansion of agricultural research in food, health, energy, chemical feedstock, and specialty chemicals while helping to preserve, enhance, and remediate the environment. Recent advances in genomic technologies especially omics-based technologies play a major role in improving the utilization of genetic resources and mining of potential genes. This chapter mainly emphasizes on importance of plant genetic resources and intervention of different omics-based technologies including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metagenomics for the identification, characterization, mining and introgression of the identified beneficial genes for disease and pest resistance, qualitative traits, drought tolerance traits, and their introgression into the plants for increasing the future world food security.