Vol. 11, Special Issue 5 (2022)

Author(s):
Mamta Choudhary and Aarti Sharma

Abstract:
Lentil is an important legume crop with a large and complex. Most of the lentil growing countries face problem of abiotic and biotic stresses which cause substantial losses in crop growth, yield, and production. Till now, lentil researcher has used conventional plant breeding methods of selection to develop improved cultivars. These techniques have been successful for the improvement of monogenic traits. However, for improving complex quantitative traits, these conventional breeding methods are not that much useful. The genetic improvement of economic traits become difficult as most of these traits are complex, quantitative and often influenced by environments and genotype–environment interaction. Marker assisted breeding is relatively powerful and fast approach to develop high yielding varieties that are adaptive to adverse environmental conditions. New tools such as molecular markers and bioinformatics gives knowledge and improve our understanding on the genetics of complex traits for better improvement of our varieties. In the past, the genomic resources were limited in lentil which restricts the breeders to employ these tools in mainstream breeding program. The recent advancement of the next generation sequencing and genotyping by sequencing technologies made lentil genome sequencing project easier and speed up large discovery of genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers.