Offsetting Climate Change Impact Through Genetic Enhancement

Abstract

Climate change and its effects have become a burning issue of today's era. The anthropogenic activities have created many impacts on environment and on our crop plants. Crop plants are facing the problems they had never seen before. These problems are prominently water scarcity, drought, water logging, salinity, increasing temperature, terminal seasonal heat etc. Plant breeder's role is becoming very important in developing crop varieties suitable for climate resilient agriculture, understanding the genetics of novel traits, utilizing the crop germplasm which are still on breeders' shelf, and understanding the physiology of crops. Plant breeders can use crop germplasm, crop wild relatives, underutilized crops, potential plants to be developed as crops to tackle the impacts of climate change and help the farmers to feed the ever-growing population. Utilization of novel plant breeding tools such as marker assisted selection, genomic selection, transgenic, genome editing, allele mining etc. will augment the conventional plant breeding of future. Accelerated crop domestication has emerged as a new way to widen the scope of crop plants for growing demand and divergent needs of future generations. Future of plant breeding will be supplemented with the advancement of extensive, accurate, ef􀃥cient and non-invasive phenotyping. The plant breeding will be assisted in future with phenomics, arti􀃥cial intelligence, Internet of Things, Machine learning and Big data analysis.