Breeding and genomics approaches to increase crop yield under drought stress in climate change scenario

Abstract

Climate change has been a threat to food security challenges. Climate change presents an additional stress on food security challenges as it affects production of food in many ways. Among various stresses, drought is a big concern and rising at an alarming rate with climate change. Scientific approaches are being tried to understand the mechanisms of drought stress. The emergence of new molecular biology approaches and new sequencing as well as phenotyping platforms good research progress has been made in regard to drought and drought resistance mechanisms via identification of quantitative trait loci or genes responsible for drought tolerance mechanisms through Qtl mapping, Family based Qtl mapping, Linkage disequilibrium, Structural and Functional genomics approaches. Genome wide selection methods have been used for the current world concern of drought which will eventually lead to climate resilient crops and will solve the problem of food insecurity in near future. Huge data are being derived from genome wide selection (GWS) studies at the transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics levels, but how efficiently to explore and exploit these data to extract the essential functional pathways or networks for genetic improvement of drought resistance remains a significant challenge.