Genomic interventions to improve resilience of pigeonpea in changing climate

Pigeonpea is an important food legume crop for rainfed agriculture in developing countries, particularly in India. Productivity gains in pigeonpea have remained static, and the challenge of improving pigeonpea yield is further aggravated by increasingly uncertain climatic conditions. Improved pigeonpea cultivars with favourable traits, allowing them to cope with climatic adversities, are urgently required. Modern genomic technologies have the potential to rapidly improve breeding traits that confer resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Recent advances in pigeonpea genomics have led to the development of large-scale genomic tools to accelerate breeding programs. Availability of high-density genotyping assays and high-throughput phenotyping platforms motivate researchers to adopt new breeding techniques like genomic selection (GS) for improving complex traits. Accurate GS predictions inferred from multilocation and multiyear data sets also open new avenues for ‘remote breeding’ which is very much required to achieve genotype selection for future climates. Speed breeding pigeonpea with deployment of rapid generation advancement (RGA) technologies will improve our capacity to breed cultivars endowed with resilient traits. Once such climate-resilient cultivars are in place, their rapid dissemination to farmer’s fields will be required to witness the real impact. Equally important will be the acceleration of varietal turnover to keep pace with the unpredictably changing climatic conditions so that cultivars are constantly optimized for the climatic conditions at any given time

Insights into Insect Resistance in Pulse Crops: Problems and Preventions

Globally, insect pests cause considerable damage to pulse crops. Hence developing broad-spectrum resistance against insect pests has been a major challenge to pulse growers and scientists. Traditionally, cultural practices and synthetic insecticides are being utilized for effective control of insect pests since ages. Apart from these, other strategies such as host plant resistance, insect-resistant transgenic crops, and IPM are also being used to manage the infestation in pulse crops. Though screening of genetic resources for insect resistance has been promising in some pulse crops, fertility barriers and linkage drag minimize the effective utilization of identified resistance in commercially viable crop breeding programs. In parallel, insect-resistant transgenic plants have been developed using various insecticidal proteins from various sources including Bacillus thuringiensis endotoxin, plant protease inhibitors, chitinases, alpha-amylase inhibitors, secondary metabolites, and vegetative insecticidal proteins (VIPs). Deploying transgenic plants with high levels of toxin expression by gene pyramiding is another practical option to delay the resistance development in insects. Nevertheless, the success achieved so far in managing insect pests is limited mainly due to the complex mechanisms underlying the defense strategies together with the lack of precision in screening techniques. Here, we discuss the recent progress and current status of studies toward developing resistance to the most common insect pests of pulses. This chapter points the lack of detailed molecular studies exploring the insect resistance that can advance our knowledge on plant resistance mechanisms and the genes involved. Therefore, a step forward now will be on exploiting natural variations with novel technologies in combination of eco-safe management practices to develop durable insect-resistant pulse crops. Despite technical and regulatory difficulties, developing insect resistance should be the major priority area for future breeding and genetic engineering studies aiming at pulse crop improvement

Recent advancement in modern genomic tools for adaptation of Lablab purpureus L to biotic and abiotic stresses: present mechanisms and future adaptations

Not AvailableHyacinth bean is an important traditional plant with substantial medicinal value. Being imperative, it is still less explored crop on genomic and transcriptomic scale that has indexed it as an “orphan” crop for its genome revolution. Among different crop legumes such as pigeon pea, chickpea, cowpea, soybean and common bean, hyacinth bean also serves as a significant source of nutrition for both tropical and temperate regions and execute an imperative function in fixing biological nitrogen in agriculture. Nonetheless, the productivity of hyacinth bean is restrained due to environmental and biotic cues. Thus, understanding of the genomic functions and identification of probable genes/proteins for major agronomic traits through transcriptomic approaches has become imperative to improve stress tolerance in hyacinth bean. For understanding the plant stress tolerance mechanisms, the deployment of functional genomics approaches viz., proteomics and metabolomics have become imperious in breeding programs in developing countries. These approaches have been successfully used in other legume crops to create protein reference maps and their exploitation through comparative approaches can greatly enhance the research and understanding of hyacinth bean biological processes to changing environmental conditions. In this review, emerging epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics approaches and their achievements both in model/crop legumes are discussed. Additionally, the review also provides an overview of the applications of advanced proteomics, metabolomics and next-generation sequencing technologies in the discovery of candidate biomarkers for the development of agronomically refined hyacinth bean which may further ensure food and nutritional security under adverse climacteric conditions in developing countries.Not Availabl