In Quest of Novel Alleles for Stress Tolerance in Chickpea

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an important grain legume and plays a crucial role in food and nutritional security globally. Numerous biotic and abiotic constraints frequently place a cap on its production potential. Drought, salinity, heat, and cold are important factors among abiotic stresses, and fungal, viral, nematode, and insect infestation are crucial biotic stresses that extensively impact chickpea production. The most preferred strategy of controlling these biotic and abiotic limitations is to breed genetically tolerant cultivars, which is a prime objective of chickpea breeding programs. Extensive studies for development of resistances have been done by evaluating chickpea germplasm, cultivars, and landraces to identify potential donors that could be useful in the breeding program. In order to improve the effectiveness of transferring genes from wild species into chickpea elite genotypes, resistances to diseases including Ascochyta blight and Fusarium wilt have been found. Costs have decreased as a result of advances in sequencing technology, and the development of vast genomic resources in chickpea has followed. The integration of conventional breeding methods with cutting-edge genomic data has the potential to speed up chickpea crop development efforts. Various molecular markers have recently been developed, used in a variety of mapping studies, such as linkage mapping and association mapping, and then deployed for the development of superior varieties utilizing MAS techniques. Recent advances in chickpea have led to the development of significant genomic resources to investigate resistance genes. Among the resources listed are bacterial artificial chromosome libraries, microarrays, Axiome genotyping arrays, expressed sequence tag libraries, and genome sequences, although these resources have yet to be fully exploited for breeding better chickpea cultivars. Along with these genomic resources, high throughput and advances in phenotyping tools will further increase efficiency and effectiveness of breeding program. The current chapter describes and reviews the impact of several biotic and abiotic constrains in chickpea growth and development. It also presents suggestions for future breeding and explains how various traits relate to yield under stress.