Genomics Assisted Breeding for Sustainable Agriculture: Meeting the Challenge of Global Food Security

Abstract

Increasing global population coupled with climate change has become a big challenge for the plant breeders and researchers to ensure the food security. Despite a great success of plant breeding, it suffers with few challenges like laborious phenotyping, tedious, resource intensive, and environment dependent which slow down the genetic gain and the cultivar improvement process. The marker assisted breeding or marker assisted selection has evolved gradually as genomics assisted breeding (GAB). In the recent times, genomics has contributed significantly to the selection intensity and selection accuracy which leads to genetic gain in crop improvement and significantly decrease the breeding cycle time and required workforce during selection. Hence it complements during the selections and the process of cultivar improvement. GAB has been deployed in breeding high yielding varieties; abiotic and biotic stress tolerant varieties and climate resilient varieties of food crops. Though the GAB has a great potential for sustainable agriculture, several bottlenecks still impede its direct application. Efforts are needed to divert in direction to overcome the bottlenecks associated with GAB which will help to achieve full potential of GAB in crop improvement and food security. Product of GAB is non-GM and has wider acceptance by consumers and farmers. We believe that the use of GAB in plant breeding will help to feed the ever growing population which will help for sustainable agricultural development.