Genetic Improvement of Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica L.)

Millets are minor cereal belonging to Poaceae family with an ability to grown in arid and semi-arid zone. It is a big source of food in African and Asian countries, although worldwide consumption has also increased in last few years. Among all millets, foxtail millet is a C4 Panicoid cereal with small grained, known for its resistance against various environmental stresses and high nutritional importance. It is a good model system for C4 Panicoid species with relatively smaller genome of ~515 MB. It is known to produce relatively good yield with high nutritive value under adverse environmental conditions. Due to rapid urbanisation, change in life style, population burst, and climate change, there is an urgent need to develop high nutritive climate-resilient crop varieties. Foxtail millet possesses in-built ability to cope up with adverse climatic conditions. Conventional improvement has contributed for its improvement, yet novel biotechnological tools including large-scale evaluation of germplasm, genome-wide association studies, transcriptomics, CRISPR/cas9, and speed breeding will speed up the precision breeding to achieve foxtail millet improvement for nutritional quality and yield under multiple biotic and abiotic stresses.