Legumes are a better source of proteins and are richer in diverse micronutrients over the nutritional profile of widely consumed cereals. However, when exposed to a diverse range of abiotic stresses, their overall productivity and quality are hugely impacted. Our limited understanding of genetic determinants and novel variants associated with the abiotic stress response in food legume crops restricts its amelioration. Therefore, it is imperative to understand different molecular approaches in food legume crops that can be utilized in crop improvement programs to minimize the economic loss. ‘Omics’-based molecular breeding provides better opportunities over conventional breeding for diversifying the natural germplasm together with improving yield and quality parameters. Due to molecular advancements, the technique is now equipped with novel ‘omics’ approaches such as ionomics, epigenomics, fluxomics, RNomics, glycomics, glycoproteomics, phosphoproteomics, lipidomics, regulomics, and secretomics. Pan-omics—which utilizes the molecular bases of the stress response to identify genes (genomics), mRNAs (transcriptomics), proteins (proteomics), and biomolecules (metabolomics) associated with stress regulation—has been widely used for abiotic stress amelioration in food legume crops. Integration of pan-omics with novel omics approaches will fast-track legume breeding programs. Moreover, artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms can be utilized for simulating crop yield under changing environments, which can help in predicting the genetic gain beforehand. Application of machine learning (ML) in quantitative trait loci (QTL) mining will further help in determining the genetic determinants of abiotic stress tolerance in pulses.

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Aluminium stress causes plant growth retardation and engenders productivity loss under acidic soil conditions. This study accentuates morpho-physiological and molecular bases of aluminium (Al) tolerance within and between wild (ILWL-15) and cultivated (L-4602 and BM-4) lentil species. Morpho-physiological studies revealed better cyto-morphology of tolerant genotypes over sensitive under Al3+ stress conditions. Mitotic lesions were observed in root cells under these conditions. Transcriptome analysis under Al3+ stress revealed 30,158 specifically up-regulated genes in different comparison groups showing contigs between 15,305 and 18,861 bp. In tolerant genotypes, top up-regulated differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were found to be involved in organic acid synthesis and exudation, production of antioxidants, callose synthesis, protein degradation, and phytohormone- and calcium-mediated signalling under stress conditions. DEGs associated with epigenetic regulation and Al3+ sequestration inside vacuole were specifically upregulated in wild and cultivars, respectively. Based on assembled unigenes, an average of 6,645.7 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and 14,953.7 high-quality single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were spotted. By quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), 12 selected genes were validated. Gene ontology (GO) annotation revealed a total of 8,757 GO terms in three categories, viz., molecular, biological, and cellular processes. Kyoto Encyclopaedia of Genes and Genomes pathway scanning also revealed another probable pathway pertaining to metacaspase-1,−4, and −9 for programmed cell death under Al-stress conditions. This investigation reveals key inter- and intraspecies metabolic pathways associated with Al-stress tolerance in lentil species that can be utilised in designing future breeding programmes to improve lentil and related species towards Al3+ stress.

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The present study was conducted at College of Post Graduate Studies in Agricultural Sciences, Meghalaya, India in the rabi season (November–April) of 2020–21 to study genetic variability, character association and identify high yielding Al tolerant lentil RILs genotypes suitable for Al toxicity prone acidic soils of Meghalaya. The genotypes were screened through phenotypic evaluation in the field, character association, root morphology studies and determination of root Al content. The pooled variance analysis over two locations revealed highly significant genotype×location interaction for the traits under study except days to maturity, number of primary branches plant-1 and number of seeds pod-1, whereas variance due to genotypes was highly significant for all the 10 characters except number of seeds pod-1. Among all the characters, high Hbs2 coupled with high GA percentage were observed in number of primary branches plant-1, plant height and 100 seed weight. Highly positive and highly significant correlation was observed between seed yield plant-1 with number of pods plant-1 (0.84***), biological yield plant-1 (0.79***), number of seeds pod-1 (0.47***), number of primary branches plant-1 (0.31***) and harvest index (0.31***). From the root morphology analysis, it was observed that high yielding tolerant genotypes constituted of well-established root systems under acidic soil conditions. Based on mean performance of seed yield plant-1, various attributing traits and root morphology studies the best performing genotypes were LRIL-37, LRIL-22, LRIL-96, LRIL-97, LRIL-144, LRIL-92 and LRIL-109. The identified genotypes may be used for further evaluation in multiple environments for final release and also for use in the hybridisation programme.