Exploring the genomics of abiotic stress tolerance and crop resilience to climate change

Abstract

Abiotic stresses have a detrimental impact on crop production globally. The escalating frequency and intensity of these stresses, driven by rapid changes in climatic conditions, pose significant challenges to agriculture. This situation is worsened by the burgeoning human population that is projected to heighten the demand for food in the coming years, emphasizing the need for further agricultural innovations. Addressing these challenges and steering agriculture toward sustainability requires concerted research efforts to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change-induced abiotic stresses. One of the most logical and cost-effective strategies on a global scale is the development and utilization of crop varieties endowed with increased tolerance to different abiotic stresses.Conventional breeding has played a key role in developing crops resilient to abiotic stress; however, recent advancements in genomics technologies have expedited these efforts. The development and public availability of multiple crop genomes, coupled with improvements in genome assembly quality and the emergence of pangenome and super-pangenome, signify a substantial leap forward. Highquality reference genomes, whole-genome resequencing, and pangenome approaches have enabled the mapping of allelic variants, discovery of candidate genes, development of molecular markers, and the introgression of traits related to abiotic stress tolerance. This wealth of genomic data, complemented by other omics datasets such as transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics, has effectively bridged the genotype-phenotype gap (Varshney, Bohra et al., 2021). This integration is crucial for gene mapping and marker-assistedThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.