Global climate change has made increased agricultural production more difficult in recent years and it is supposed to challenge food security and nutritional security in future. The speed at which the current breeding programs are walking may not help in conquering losses due to climatic fluctuation and ensuring self-sufficiency in food production. So there is need of scientific and technological inventions those can be effective enough to solve or minimize farming issues. Unique smart breeding technologies support breeders to answer some of global agriculture’s most occurring problems thereby increasing the quality, resilience and adaptability of future crops. Smart breeding is the combination of speed breeding, genomics assisted breeding, artificial intelligence and genome editing, which provides opportunities to develop climate-resilient crops within less time.
Crop breeding is a decision making process at all its stages of breeding programme such as testing, mapping and introgression of traits, where breeders select individual plants harbouring the best traits from large segregating populations. But these conventional breeding practices mostly remain very slow and inadequate to enhance the development of crop varieties. For ease in breeding, since 1990, molecular markers are used to identify hybrid genotypes. Breeders also focus on crops those achieve multiple generations within a year which ultimately leads to gaining the desired phenotype faster. This can be achieved by speed breeding, where controlled environmental conditions are given by providing optimum light, humidity, temperature etc. for a particular crop, resulting in reducing the breeding cycle, growing crops round the years and rapid generation advance. Speed breeding protocols have been successfully implemented in crops like rice, wheat, barley, oats, chickpea, sorghum, bajra, ground nut, lentil, flaxseed etc..
The use of genomic tools to improve the efficiency of plant breeding is known as genomics assisted breeding, which includes marker assisted backcross breeding, marker assisted recurrent selection and genomic selection. Marker assisted backcross breeding is the most commonly used technique for improving an elite variety by introducing a few loci or major QTLs. Genomics assisted breeding has accelerated breeding progress across a wide range of crop species over past 15 years, developing more than 130 publicly bred cultivars.
Climate change driven global warming can trigger higher insect pest pressures and plant diseases thus affecting crop production. In addition, climate change is also expected to cause loss of biodiversity, mainly in more marginal environments.In order to feed the growing population, there is urgent need to use crop wild relatives, for developing broad spectrum varieties to tackle various biotic and abiotic stresses. Wild relatives and ancestral species relatively possess broader adaptation to environment and climates. Prebreeding is an opportunity to introgress desirable genes from wild species into elite breeding lines/genotypes/cultivars to overcome linkage drag. In this way, crop wild relatives containing resistant genes for abiotic factors like drought, flood, salinity, heat stress, and biotic factors like insect pests and diseases can be used to improve elite varieties with specific defects.
Genome editing has also huge potential to accelerate the domestication of novel crops from wild relatives for coping with extreme climatic events. This could allow the editing of key genes for domestication in potential new crops for rapid improvement of currently limited gene pools to maximize the use of germplasm adapted to climate change. Also, multiplexing of CRISPR system for simultaneous editing of multiple genetic loci can boost the speed and efficiency manifolds.
Omics technologies (genomics, phenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbiomics) together with approaches to gather information about climate and field environment conditions have become a routine in breeding programs now-a-days. Integrating with phenomics and genomics and by assisting with big data, artificial intelligence technologies can boost up the development of climate resilient crop varieties with enhanced yield potential and stability and improved tolerance to expected environmental stresses.
The concept of smart breeding greatly depends on generating large breeding populations, efficient high throughput phenotyping, big data management tools and downstream molecular techniques to tackle the vulnerability of crops to changing climate. The technological enhancement in phenotypic and genotypic analysis as well as the biotechnological and digital revolution could definitely pave the way for deployment of climate smart varieties in future days.

Arpita Mohapatra

University/College name : OUAT