Phenomics: A Challenge for Crop Improvement in Genomic Era

The last two decades have observed tremendous progress in the genomics for plant breeding research, especially the availability of a large number of high-throughput cost-effective molecular markers and genotyping platforms, advances in sequencing technologies leading the reduction in sequencing costs and making available genome sequences of major crop genomes, etc. But the advance in phenomics is lagging far behind our present day capacity to generate high-throughput molecular genotyping data, thus creating phenotypic bottleneck”. The accurate and precise phenotypic data is an essential component in the discovery of genes/QTLs of important agronomic traits using modern genomic approaches; otherwise it leads to false positives and false negatives. Therefore, it necessitates the development of high-throughput phenotyping facilities. Although, several phenotyping facilities have been developed around the world that can scan and record precise and accurate data for thousands of plants quickly by making use of non-invasive imaging, spectroscopy, image analysis, robotics and high-performance computing facilities, but more efforts and funds are required to be allocated in this field to achieve fruitful results from genomics/molecular breeding approaches like QTL interval mapping, association mapping, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), QTL cloning, QTL validation, marker-assisted selection (MAS), marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS), TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes) and genomic selection (GS) or genome-wide selection (GWS).