A review on conventional and modern breeding approaches for developing climate resilient crop varieties

Abstract

The escalating threat of climate change is a major challenge to global food security. One of the ways to mitigate its impact is by developing crops that can withstand environmental stresses such as drought, heat, and salinity. Plant breeders have been employing conventional and modern approaches to achieve climate-resilient crops. Climate-resilient crops refer to both crop and crop varieties that exhibit improved tolerance towards biotic and abiotic stresses. These crops possess the capacity to maintain or even increase their yields when exposed to various stress conditions, such as drought, flood, heat, chilling, freezing and salinity. Conventional breeding entails selecting and crossing plants with desirable traits, while modern breeding deploys molecular techniques to identify and transfer specific genes associated with stress tolerance. However, the effectiveness of both methods is contingent on the crop species and the targeted stress. Advancements in gene editing, such as CRISPER-cas9 and genomics-assisted breeding, offer new opportunities to hasten the development of climate-resilient crops. These new technologies include Marker Assisted Selection, Genome-Wide Association Studies, Mutation breeding, Transcriptomics, Genomics, and more. The review concludes that these cutting-edge techniques have the potential to enhance the speed and precision of developing crops that can endure the challenges posed by climate change.