Breeding Proso Millet for Biotic Stress Resistance

Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum), one of the nutria-cereals which is renowned for its hardiness, ability to withstand drought, and short growing season. It is a water efficient crop and is enriched with nutrients. Due to its relative aversion to pests and diseases, it has an immense potential to be an exemplary crop for global climate change. Despite this, there are few prevalent diseases of which head smut, bacterial stripe disease, kernel smut, and leaf spot are important, causing substantial reduction in grain yield. Among the pests, shoot fly is the most serious. Proso millet is similarly subjected to annual and perennial weed competition. Crop rotation and adjusting sowing times are often used techniques in millet to prevent disease and insect pressure. Different traditional and advanced breeding techniques are used by plant breeders to develop disease and pest tolerant varieties. However, in spite of the impeccable benefits, development of agricultural improvement in this millet remains under explored due to extreme scarcity of research fundings leading to lack of sufficient genomic resources. Although, there are few reports on molecular markers for identifying pathotypes by screening genotypes that were discovered to be possible differential hosts. Recent advancements in identification of novel molecular markers and development of first linkage map has paved the way for accelerating proso millet breeding for biotic stress resistance with further availability of next-generation sequencing, together with high-throughput phenotyping.