Genomics: Shaping Legume Improvement

Legume crops are important to global food security and sustainability of agricultural systems. However, low and unstable yield of grain legumes as compared to cereals has been a major bottleneck in the expansion of cultivation area in these crops. The past two decades have witnessed remarkable growth in genomics-derived improvement in most of the crop species including legumes. Genomics-assisted approaches have enabled the fast-track development of varieties with agriculturally important traits in these crops. Further the search of more efficient and accurate methods has opened avenues for genomic selection (GS) implementation in crop improvement programs. Initial reports on GS in legumes are encouraging, and these studies are guiding researchers for optimal resource utilization for enhancing prediction ability of line performance. Efforts to shorten long generation time through optimization of rapid generation technologies (RGT) in legumes have further enhanced the ability of genomics-based crop improvement. Legume crops such as pigeonpea and soybean are also exploiting heterosis to boost yield gains. In this regard, genomics advances have been made to support hybrid breeding efforts in these crops. Further, new strategies like sequence-based breeding have been proposed which efficiently combine population improvement with GS and genome-wide association (GWAS). In this chapter, we summarize the major breakthroughs in legume genomics and molecular breeding. This is accompanied by a brief discussion on recent cases that apply GS and speed breeding in grain legumes. We conclude this chapter by highlighting future scope and limitations of adopting new genomics and breeding tools for shaping legume improvement