Abstract
The world population will surpass nine billion by 2050; hence the yield of primary staple crops must increase to feed the growing world population (Tilman et al. 2011; Ray et al. 2013; Molotoks et al. 2021). Another challenge facing agriculture is increasing global temperature, which is expected to be1.1 to 5.4 °C warmer by the end of this century (Tollefson 2020). Given these dire predictions, crops are expected to experience heat stress during their growing season and more frequent droughts (Mir et al. 2012; Zhao et al. 2017; Fahad et al. 2017; Rustgi et al. 2021). These changes would result in nutritional insecurity and instability owing to crop productivity decreases, specifically in the world’s resource-deprived and most populated parts (Maja and Ayano 2021; Molotoks et al. 2021). Plant breeders are finding novel ways to meet this ever-increasing demand for food grains given the climatic atrocities such as increasing global temperatures, erratic rain patterns, and accompanying changes in pest and pathogen populations (White et al. 2011; Maja and Ayano 2021). Another layer of complexity is diminishing resources (land and water availability, soil health, and increasing production cost), the demand to reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint, and adaptation of rentable practices to improve sustainably in agriculture. To meet these targets, plant breeders have developed improved cultivars of different crop plants largely by using conventional plant breeding approaches involving genetic crossing and selection for the desired traits, but this strategy primarily focused on the crop’s primary gene pool (Kaiser et al. 2020). However, recent advances now mean that molecular plant breeding can include genomic and biotechnological approaches, offering plant breeders to introduce desired genetic changes in the crop genome from a wider gene pool with greater precision and speed. Therefore, the conventional crop improvement approaches are aggressively being supplemented by molecular plant breeding approaches to achieve the desired outcome in a relatively short duration (Hasan et al. 2021).
