Genomics Assisted Breeding for Improving Disease and Pest Resistance in Crop Plants

Climate change-induced pest and disease dispersal and intensity threaten food security as a whole. Traditional resistance breeding strategies followed in crop plants shown slow progress and necessitates to develop precise and rapid breeding programs. Recent advances in omics tools have offered unique opportunities in this direction. Sequencing the genomes of the crops and their pathogens/pests are very constructive in understanding their evolutionary relationships. Unravelling the co-evolution of genes of virulence and resistance will help in designing plant protection strategies and working models to understand plant-pathogen and plant–insect interactions. Such efforts will enable in predicting the allelic differences that cause variations in host plant resistance among wild relatives and modern cultivars and they can be introgressed into the elite cultivars / hybridsHybrid using efficient molecular breeding tools. This chapter describes such genomicsGenomics assisted breeding strategies and tools to impart broad-spectrum resistance to pest and diseases in crop plants.