Innovations in Artificial Induction of Plant Genetic Diversity

Plant breeding aimed at crop improvement is dependent upon the genetic variability in the available genetic resources. This is essentially required as the current scenario of food security is threatened by several agricultural, climatic, and population issues which necessitate for an increased food production channel. Often plant breeders attempt to incorporate genetic diversity into cultivated germplasm through different approaches to improve agronomic traits associated with yield, quality, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses in crop plants. These include genetic selection, mutation breeding, somaclonal variation, and transgenic breeding which are employed to increase the genetic variability for desirable traits. Using mutagenesis, several mutant varieties have been released globally catering to the needs of regional and global food security. Varieties have also been developed using somaclonal variation and genetic transformation for use in plant improvement. In addition, different genomics tools such as epigenomics, transposons, and genome editing have provided novel ways of inducing genetic variability in crop plants, for example programmable nucleases, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) have offered new avenues for precise genetic modification and thus new era of molecular plant breeding era has begun. In this review, we have presented the components of cellular and molecular toolbox for inducing genetic variability in crop plants.