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Multi-omics strategies and prospects to enhance seed quality and nutritional traits in pigeonpea

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Abstract

Food and nutritional security are an essential goals for the entire global population during climate change scenarios. These twin challenges can be addressed by expanding the global cropping system by promoting grain and legume crops, especially pulses in India. Legume seeds are known as “meat for vegetarian diets”. Ever-increasing pigeonpea consumption as a major source of protein necessitates the improvement of varieties for more efficient production. Pigeonpea is an important legume crop with high protein content and nutritional attributes for more than a billion people living in South Asia. This hardy legume has a considerable potential positive impact on the lives of poor farmers as compared to other legumes, due to better productivity under extreme environmental conditions such as heat, drought and low soil fertility. However, pigeonpea productivity is still low for decades because of sparse utilization of landraces and wild pigeonpea germplasm as genetic and genomic resources. Recent advances in next-generation sequencing, together with other “omics” technologies have significantly reinforced pigeonpea research. Despite the remarkable progress in these technologies, the analysis and mining of existing seed genomics data are still challenging due to the complexity of genetic inheritance, metabolic partitioning, and developmental regulations. The integration of “omics tools” is an effective strategy to discover critical regulators of various seed traits. To utilize its potential, a coordinated and comprehensive evaluation of germplasm is required. Identification of potential genes/alleles governing complex traits of seed quality and nutritional content such as seed weight, seed size, seed color, total protein content, amino acid, antioxidant, resistant starch and disease resistance are essential in genomic selection for quality trait improvement of pigeonpea. Therefore, we need to understand these complex genetic architectures of qualitative and quantitative traits in pigeonpea for the development of nutrient-dense varieties for value addition. It helps in reducing malnutrition, protein, energy, and amino acid deficiency in food and feed related problems that are common in the majority of the population and more specific to developing countries. In this review, a comprehensive discussion on recent advances in “omics” approaches, their use in pigeonpea seed quality, and nutritional trait investigations are presented along with the available databases and technological platforms and their applicability in the improvement of pigeonpea. This article highlights the catalog of important available resources to improve the knowledge base and its future utilization in pigeonpea crop improvement programs.

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Acknowledgements

NS acknowledges the funding from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India through DST INSPIRE Faculty Award Grant (DST/INSPIRE/04/2018/003674).

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  1. ICAR- National Institute for Plant Biotechnology, New Delhi, 110012, India

    Nisha Singh, Vandna Rai & Nagendra Kumar Singh

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  1. Nisha Singh
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NS conceived, prepared the manuscript and got grant for undertaking this research work. VR and NKS has helped in drafting the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Nisha Singh.

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Singh, N., Rai, V. & Singh, N.K. Multi-omics strategies and prospects to enhance seed quality and nutritional traits in pigeonpea. Nucleus 63, 249–256 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13237-020-00341-0

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