Breeding strategies for improved multistress-resilient crops

Abstract

Multiple stresses including abiotic and biotic, affecting crop plants are more common nowadays in the era of climate change. These stresses include several abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, cold, heat, mineral deficiency, mineral toxicity, and waterlogging and biotic stresses such as diseases, pests, insects, and weeds. Breeding suitable cultivars with the capacity to endure multiple stresses are need of the hour. The approaches in the past were conventional pedigree-based selection, backcross-assisted introgression and transfer, and recombination breeding. However, in the recent past, the marker-assisted backcross breeding (MABB) approach has been used successfully to transfer multiple abiotic and biotic stress-tolerant oligogenic/major QTLs from donor genotypes into elite lines. Presently, with the advent of robust and cheaper genotyping costs, the capability to analyze big data, high computational efficiency, and the use of rapid generation techniques (Speed Breeding), genomic selection has emerged as a major player in breeding. Genomic selection breeding pipelines are very robust in predicting the performance of genotypes. The present chapter summarizes a thorough understanding of conventional and molecular breeding approaches to develop multistress-tolerant crop varieties. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025. All rights reserved.