Chickpea Breeding for Abiotic Stress: Breeding Tools and ‘Omics’ Approaches for Enhancing Genetic Gain

Chickpea production is seriously challenged by various biotic and abiotic stresses globally. Among the various abiotic stresses, drought, heat, salinity and cold stresses are the major factors that restrict sustainable global chickpea production. Considerable progress has been made in developing drought, heat, cold and salinity stress-tolerant chickpea genotypes through conventional breeding approaches in concert with advanced breeding methods. Concurrently, current progress of molecular marker technology and availability of high-density genetic maps allowed genetic dissection of various abiotic stresses through biparental QTL mapping approach in chickpea. Subsequently, release of draft chickpea genome sequences greatly enriched chickpea genomic repertoire that provided us great opportunity for exploring the novel genetic determinants/haplotypes controlling these stresses across the whole genome level through genome-wide association study (GWAS). In parallel, current efforts of re-sequencing of global chickpea germplasm hold great promise for exploring ‘haplotype assembly’ carrying allelic variations for various abiotic stresses. Likewise, rapid advances in functional genomic approaches have enabled in unfolding the candidate gene(s) underlying the QTLs controlling these abiotic stresses, providing novel insights into the key molecular players participating in the complex mechanisms to acclimatize chickpea against various abiotic stress stimuli. In this chapter, we cover the effects of various abiotic stresses in chickpea, scope of diverse gene pool enabling in tailoring abiotic stress-tolerant chickpea genotypes and the role of rapidly growing genomics and emerging phenomics approaches to measure precise spatio-temporal response of plant under abiotic stresses for bridging genotyping and phenotyping gap. Finally, we conclude the chapter by discussing feasibility and scope of novel breeding techniques including genomic selection, ‘speed breeding’ and genome editing tool that could help in accelerating desired genetic gain to ensure protein-based nutritional food security under the fluctuating global climate scenario.