Genomics-Assisted Breeding: A Powerful Breeding Approach for Improving Plant Growth and Stress Resilience

Abstract

Climate change biotic and abiotic stressors lead to unpredictable crop yield losses, threatening global food and nutritional security. In the past, traditional breeding has been instrumental in fulfilling food demand; however, owing to its low efficiency, dependence on environmental conditions, labor intensity, and time consumption, it fails to maintain global food demand in the face of a rapidly changing environment and an expanding population. In this regard, plant breeders need to integrate multiple disciplines and technologies, such as genotyping, phenotyping, and envirotyping, in order to produce stress-resilient and high-yielding crops in a shorter time. With the technological revolution, plant breeding has undergone various reformations, for example, artificial selection breeding, hybrid breeding, molecular breeding, and precise breeding, which have been instrumental in developing high-yielding and stress-resilient crops in modern agriculture. Marker-assisted selection, also known as marker-assisted breeding, emerged as a game changer in modern breeding and has evolved over time into genomics-assisted breeding (GAB). It involves genomic information of crops to speed up plant breeding in order to develop stress-resilient and high-yielding crops. The combination of speed breeding with genomic and phenomic resources enabled the identification of quantitative trait loci (QTLs)/genes quickly, thereby accelerating crop improvement efforts. In this review, we provided an update on rapid advancement in molecular plant breeding, mainly GAB, for efficient crop improvements. We also highlighted the importance of GAB for improving biotic and abiotic stress tolerance as well as crop productivity in different crop systems. Finally, we discussed how the expansion of GAB to omics-assisted breeding (OAB) will contribute to the development of future resilient crops.