Breeding Approaches for Climate Resilience in Maize (Zea mays L.): An Overview

Anurag Tripathi, Rahul Kumar, Suresh Yadav, Jeet ram Choudhary, Mukesh Choudhary, H C Lohithaswa
2020 Acta Scientific Agriculture  
Climate change impacts agriculture in numerous ways including rising average temperatures, rainfall, changes in pests and diseases, rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, ozone concentrations at ground level and changes in the nutritional quality of certain foods. Therefore, achieving global food security for rising global population under limited arable land is a major challenge in the twenty-first century. Maize plays an ever more vital role in the growth of global grains. Maize being a C4 plant
more » ... has a high yield potential as witnessed from highest compound annual growth rate over last decade. However, in many countries maize production has been plateaued due to full exploitation of hybrid and manufacturing technologies. Therefore, maize ideotypes with favourable traits architecture need to be developed for increased stress resistance and higher yield under changing climate. In maize abiotic stress such as drought leads to delay in silking that result in an increase in the anthesis-silking interval, which is a major cause of yield losses. Acidic soils also conflict with maize production (Zea mays L.) resulting in yield losses of up to 69%. In this review, we have discussed the current challenges and different breeding approaches for sustainable maize production under changing climate i.e. climate resilience. With the advent of recent advances in omics approaches including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, great opportunity exists for development of elite climate resilient maize cultivars. Introduction Maize, (Zea mays L.), is grown in developed countries with an area of about 100 million hectares. Around 70% of total maize production comes from low and low middle-income countries (FAO-STAT, 2014). Maize is gaining popularity day by day and its demand is expected to be doubled by 2050. Maize is cultivated largely under rainfed conditions. Climate change is one of the main constraints in maize production. Uneven rains lead to both drought and flooding. Higher temperatures and low moisture drastically affect the maize production. Vulnerability to these stresses mainly affects small-scale maize farmers, which have limited adaptive capacity. Breeding strategies for adaptation to climate change such as breeding for stress tolerant maize varieties can play important role in mitigating these stresses. Farmers 'adoption of enhanced germplasm was disappointing due to inefficient seed input chains, and farmers' preference for cooking, agronomic, and cultural landraces. Maize landraces have a crucial role to play in adapting to climate change has been underestimated by many scientists. Landraces are the best source for the climate adaptive traits [23]. There is unexploited genetic diversity for novel traits and alleles within the primary gene pool of maize and its wild relatives that can serve as good source for breeding of high yielding and stress-tolerant cultivars. Therefore, utilization of the landraces, available with farmers are crucial for effective breeding of stress tolerant maize varieties Citation: Suresh Yadav., et al. "Breeding Approaches for Climate Resilience in Maize (Zea mays L.): An Overview". Acta Scientific Agriculture 4.10 (2020): 20-29. Farmers have a long record of adapting to the impacts of climate variability. However, based on current scientific knowledge, the probably impacts of climate change are out of the range of farmers' previous experiences and represent a greater challenge. Climate change will, hence, severely test the farmers' resourcefulness [2]. This review focused on technologies for the development of improved germplasm; however, this is only the first step in the process. Adaptation to climate change requires cross-disciplinary solutions that include the development of appropriate germplasm 25
doi:10.31080/asag.2020.04.0899 fatcat:zntfqr7c3ne7xjxb24l5ipo42m