OMICS in Fodder Crops: Applications, Challenges, and Prospects

Abstract

Biomass yield and quality are the primary targets in forage crop improvement programs worldwide. Low-quality fodder reduces the quality of dairy products and affects cattle’s health. In multipurpose crops, such as maize, sorghum, cowpea, alfalfa, and oat, a plethora of morphological and biochemical/nutritional quality studies have been conducted. However, the overall growth in fodder quality improvement is not on par with cereals or major food crops. The use of advanced technologies, such as multi-omics, has increased crop improvement programs manyfold. Traits such as stay-green, the number of tillers per plant, total biomass, and tolerance to biotic and/or abiotic stresses can be targeted in fodder crop improvement programs. Omic technologies, namely genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics, provide an efficient way to develop better cultivars. There is an abundance of scope for fodder quality improvement by improving the forage nutrition quality, edible quality, and digestibility. The present review includes a brief description of the established omics technologies for five major fodder crops, i.e., sorghum, cowpea, maize, oats, and alfalfa. Additionally, current improvements and future perspectives have been highlighted.

Cowpea Constraints and Breeding in Europe

“…Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were therefore helped in this direction, through SNPs and candidate genes identification and their correspondence to desirable plant traits such as flowering time and pod indehiscence, and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses [ 46 , 110 , 111 , 112 , 113 , 114 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 , 119 , 120 , 121 , 122 ]. Cowpea genetic similarities with other widely studied legumes such as soybean ( Glycine max (L.) Merr.…”

Identification of genetic basis of agronomic traits in alfalfa (Medicago sativa subsp. sativa) using Genome Wide Association Studies

“…However, approximately 20% of the high-value SNP markers are not biallelic and are discarded during construction of the vcf file. Thus, it is difficult and expensive to achieve the coverage with genome sequencing or GBS approaches to account for tetraploid allele abundance and to distinguish between the three heterozygote classes to perform GWAS (Kumar et al, 2022).…”

Editorial for the Special Issue “Genetic Sight: Plant Traits during Postharvest”

“…Omic technologies, namely genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics, provide an efficient way to develop better cultivars. With this regard, review of the established omics technologies for fodder quality improvement through the improvement of the forage nutrition quality, edible quality, and digestibility is included in this special issue [ 1 ]. Similarly, studies of genetic relationships among the family, genera or cultivars of crops through molecular markers could assist in developing resistant cultivars to diseases and pests [ 2 ], to select super-earliness QTLs for prevention of heat-induced drought stress [ 3 ], and assist in seed production through profiling the pattern of protein expression under different crossing periods [ 4 ].…”

“…Generally, as this special issue belongs to the section “Molecular Plant Sciences” and considering the interest of authors to contribute in this special issue, the editorial team tried to observe the broad spectrum, and eleven research articles [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ] and two reviews [ 1 , 5 ] were included.…”