Genomics Assisted Breeding for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Millets

Large-scale genomic resources have been generated in sorghum, finger millet and pearl millet leading to availability of large number of molecular markers and transcriptome sequences. With the availability of genome sequence in sorghum, pearl millet, and others in progress, integration of genomic technologies in millet breeding has now started in general for most of the stresses. This has raised the status of millets to genome rich crops from resource poor crops. Genomics-assisted breeding is an advanced breeding approach, wherein both the genomic information and the phenotypic selection are considered concurrently for designing phenotypes. Genomics-assisted breeding is strongly supported by third generation DNA sequencing techniques, which have provided enormous nucleotide information. Data mining and allele identification tools have allowed us to generate information for genes of interest and their functional specificity. For genomics-assisted breeding the basic need is to have maximum genomic information, trait specific mapping populations and highly precise phenotyping facilities. In millets, whole genome sequence information of sorghum, pearl millet and foxtail millets are available, which can be utilized efficiently to identify candidate genes for abiotic stress tolerance and for advancing breeding strategies such as genomic selection. QTLs conferring stress tolerance have been identified in few of the major millet crops but fine mapping and development of gene specific markers for high throughput selection needs emphasis. This chapter is a brief account of the accomplishments made in field of genomics for important millet crops like sorghum, pearl millet, foxtail millet, proso millet etc. and its application in improving abiotic tolerance.