Climate-Smart Groundnuts for Achieving High Productivity and Improved Quality: Current Status, Challenges, and Opportunities
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Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. About 90% of total groundnut is cultivated in the semi-arid tropic (SAT) regions of the world as a major oilseed and food crop and provides essential nutrients required by human diet. Climate change is the main threat to yield and quality of the produce in the SAT regions, and effects are already being seen in some temperate areas also. Rising CO2 levels, erratic rainfall, humidity, short episodes of high temperature and salinity hamper the physiology, disease resistance, fertility and yield as well as seed nutrient levels of groundnut. To meet growing demands of the increasing population against the threats of climate change, it is necessary to develop climate-smart varieties with enhanced and stable genetic improvements. Identifying key traits affected by climate change in groundnut will be important for developing an appropriate strategy for developing new varieties. Fast-changing scenarios of product ecologies as a consequence of climate change need faster development and replacement of improved varieties in the farmers fields to sustain yield and quality. Use of modern genomics technology is likely to help in improved understanding and efficient breeding for climate-smart traits such as tolerance to drought and heat, and biotic stresses such as foliar diseases, stem rot, peanut bud necrosis disease, and preharvest aflatoxin contamination. The novel promising technologies such as genomic selection and genome editing need to be tested for their potential utility in developing climate-smart groundnut varieties. System modeling may further improve the understanding and characterization of the problems of target ecologies for devising strategies to overcome the problem. The combination of conventional breeding techniques with genomics and system modeling approaches will lead to a new era of system biology assisted breeding for sustainable agricultural production to feed the ever-growing population.
