Toward Climate-Resilient Lentils: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Lentil among legumes has a significant place in crop production and rotation, and the nutritional security of growing human population. Current lentil cultivars have a narrow genetic base and are challenged with many biotic and abiotic stresses. The pressures from changing climate necessitate more efforts to find durable resistance sources for biotic and abiotic stresses. Distant landraces and wild lentil species which are less explored are known to possess such genes to develop resilient cultivars, one of the best adaptation strategies for climate change. The research efforts are currently focusing on enhancing lentil grain yield and resilience to climate change through introgression of desired genes from other gene pools. The current lentil-breeding efforts have concentrated upon conventional plant breeding techniques for the inclusion of the cultivated lentil gene pool only. Unlike other crops, genomics-assisted breeding remains one of the areas to be further explored to speed-up the climate-smart high-yielding cultivars development process, which is reliant on the extensive genomic resources. Several lentil linkage maps have been developed and quantitative trait loci for tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses have been identified. However, advances in molecular markers, next-generation sequencing, genomewide sequencing, and bioinformatics will further help to precisely identify genes of interest that can be best utilized to breed climate-resilient cultivars for higher production and quality through genetic engineering and plant breeding.