Chickpea Diseases: Breeding and “Omics” Approaches for Designing Next-Generation Disease-Resistant Chickpea Cultivar

Chickpea is an important nutritionally rich grain legume with a significant role in global food security. However, chickpea suffers significant yield losses due to various major and minor diseases, threatening global food security. Plant breeding is one of the cheapest and most environmentally friendly approaches for minimizing yield losses caused by various diseases. The chickpea gene pool contains substantial genetic variability for disease resistance, which could be harnessed to develop disease-resistant chickpea cultivars. Classical genetics based approaches have increased our understanding of disease resistance in chickpea. In the past decade, the development of genomics resources in chickpea has helped dissect the genetic basis of fusarium wilt, ascochyta blight, dry root rot, botrytis gray mold, and other minor disease resistance and identify the
underlying causal quantitative trait loci controlling disease resistance. Similarly, the availability of high-throughput SNP molecular markers has enabled genome wide association mapping to uncover the genomic regions/haplotypes governing disease resistance across the whole genome. Furthermore, the complete chickpea genome sequence, whole genome resequencing, and pangenome sequences have provided novel insights into structural variations such as presence/absence variations and copy number variations controlling disease resistance. Likewise, advances in RNA-seq-based transcriptomics have facilitated the identification of several candidate genes related to disease resistance in chickpea and their putative functions mediating disease resistance. Moreover, emerging approaches such as genomic selection, speed breeding, and genome editing technologies could be harnessed to develop next-generation disease-resistant chickpea cultivars for sustaining chickpea yield and achieving global food security.