Abstract
Biotic stresses compromise grain legume production worldwide. Deployment of the resistant varieties of grain legume crops that can withstand high disease/pest pressures is the straightforward and sustainable approach for stress management. A high resistance level of crop plants not only reduces the overall production costs but also poses no or little risk to the environment. Modern genomic technologies have deepened our understanding of the genetic determinants governing a plant’s resistance to diseases and pests and plant–pathogen/pest interactions. In-depth knowledge of the plant stress response would help devise sustainable strategies for management of biotic stresses in legume crops. The growing DNA sequence information on large germplasm collections and experimental populations of legume crops expands our capacity to characterize and utilize the untapped diversity of plant traits that confer resistance to major biotic stresses. Advanced systems have helped relieve the long-standing “phenotyping bottleneck” through imparting precision, accuracy, high throughput, and cost-effectiveness to the plant phenotyping procedures. The wealth of genetic sequence information, large-scale screening data, and multi-omics datasets available opens new avenues for identification and validation of target genomic regions and associated superior haplotypes for introgression breeding and gene editing. Successful application of the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR/Cas) system in model legumes (e.g., Medicago truncatula, Lotus japonicus, soybean) holds great promise for further extending the modern gene editing technology to other grain legume crops for improving stress responses, with emergence of new ways to overcome their transformation recalcitrance. The haplotype catalogues and trait packages for biotic stress tolerance derived from growing genetic sequence and plant phenotyping data, when integrated with refined introgression approaches, provide breeders with an unprecedented resource for rapidly modifying plant traits to overcome stressful conditions.