Genomic resources for breeding crops with enhanced abiotic stress tolerance

To meet the challenges of climate change, exploring natural diversity in the existing plant genetic resource pool as well as creation of new mutants through chemical mutagenesis and molecular biology is needed for developing climate-resilient elite genotypes. Ever-increasing area under existing abiotic stresses as well as emerging abiotic stress factors and their combinations have further added to the problems of the current crop improvement programmes. However, with the advancement in modern techniques such as next-generation sequencing technologies, it is now possible to generate on a whole-genome scale, genomic resources for crop species at a much faster pace with considerably less efforts and money. The genomic resources thus generated will be useful for various plant breeding applications such as marker-assisted breeding for gene introgression, mapping QTLs or identifying new or rare alleles associated with a particular trait. In this article, we discuss various aspects of generation of genomic resources and their utilization for developing abiotic stress-tolerant crops to ensure sustainable agricultural production and food security in the backdrop of rapid climate change.