“…Br. ), as the sixth most crucial cereal crops after rice, wheat, maize, barley and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) in the world (Awan et al, 2020;Dan et al, 2020;Khan et al, 2020a;Khan et al, 2019a;Khan et al, 2020b;Khan et al, 2019b;Shivhare and Lata, 2016;Sun et al, 2020), is cultivated on ~27 million hectares worldwide as a staple food crop in arid and semi-arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa, India and South Asia where grain yields average 900 kg/ha (Andrews and Kumar, 1992;Varshney et al, 2017). It feeds more than 90 million farmers living in poverty with high nutritious (8-19% protein), high fiber (1.2 g/100 g), low starch, and higher micronutrient concentrations (iron and zinc) than wheat, rice, sorghum and maize (Varshney et al, 2017).…”