Improving Water Stress Resilient Crop Breeding Using Phenomics and Genomics Information Derived from Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L.)

Abstract

In this unpredictable climatic scenario, increasing crop productivity under lowwater availability is the foremost challenge. The crops are further seriouslyaffected, and the yields are drastically reduced due to elevated temperature,greenhouse gases, and humidity during the water stress period. To ensurefood security in the coming decades, scientists have summoned to increasethe high-quality food with these climatic vagaries. Though several agronomicand management strategies were proposed to mitigate the water stress,genetic improvement of crops with improved drought tolerance is the simple,sustainable and affordable option. Nevertheless, identification and molecularunderstanding of the appropriate breeding traits that can alleviate the impactof water stress on crop plants are the trickiest part of this strategy. Sorghum(Sorghum bicolor L.) is gaining its importance in water stress tolerance plantbreeding, as it has several clearly defined drought-tolerant component traitsthat promote productivity under low water environments. The genomicsand phenomics information generated in S. bicolor would immensely helpbreeding plants resilient to the challenges of a water scarcity. This paperdescribes the molecular mechanisms of drought tolerance using sorghumbicolor as a model and how this information can be extrapolated to breedbetter cultivars in other crops.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.000457

Pages

1 -

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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