Revisiting the Genomic Approaches in the Cereals and the Path Forward

The important difficulties confronting humanity in the current era include combating global climate change, meeting human nutritional demands, and ensuring adequate energy sources. Cereal crops, which are grasses cultivated for their edible grains, are the primary dietary energy sources for humans and livestock and are produced in greater quantities than any other crop types. This chapter discusses the advancement and potential of various genomic tools for five main kinds of cereal: rice, maize, wheat, barley, and sorghum. We have discussed and speculated the advancements of genomics in plant improvement varying from transgenic cultivars, molecular markers and next-generation sequencing, linkage and association mapping, genome editing, pan-genome and super pan-genome sequencing, haplotype and optimal contribution selection, genomic and phenomics-assisted breeding, and finally merger of the domain of data science with plant genomics and breeding. The main success of each of these genomic tools is discussed for each crop, and why certain of them failed for specific crops is discussed with potential aspects to strengthen them with new tools. The chapter is divided into two sections. First, we have covered the traditionally used genomics. The other half shows the potential of novel genomic tools with the integration of data science. This chapter allows the reader to learn from the past inventions and failures to implement the new genomic tools with high precision and efficacy