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Epigenetics for Crop Improvement: Challenges and Opportunities with Emphasis on Wheat

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Smart Plant Breeding for Field Crops in Post-genomics Era

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Abstract

Rice, wheat and maize are the three major cereal crops that are imperative to food security and nutrition. Out of the three cereals, wheat has the most complex and largest genome (~16 GB) and is a staple food for most people worldwide. Therefore, continuous efforts are being made to improve the production of important cereals, including wheat. Breeding these cereals for major biotic and abiotic stresses and nutritional quality has been an important area of research. Further, with the advent of next-generation sequencing technology, a tremendous wealth of genomic resources is now available, paving the way for modern genomic approaches for crop improvement. Recently, epigenetics is also becoming popular as an important area of research, and some efforts have been made in this direction to understand what part of the cereals’ genome is actually regulated through epigenetic factors, which mainly include DNA methylation, histone modifications, and noncoding RNAs (including microRNAs or miRNAs and long noncoding RNAs or lncRNAs). The available literature, to some extent, suggests that epigenetics is a highly complex mechanism. Therefore, more efforts are certainly needed in this direction so that it may prove helpful in the breeding of cereals for resistance against important biotic and abiotic stresses. Some attempts have also been made to identify important epialleles in rice; however, they have not been used in breeding for the development of stress-tolerant varieties using epigenetic markers. The present chapter provides an overview of the research conducted worldwide to understand the epigenetic component involved during different environmental stresses in important cereals, with special emphasis on wheat. Further, it also highlights different challenges and future strategies that may help in development of cereal genotypes that are resistant to different environmental stresses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Gautam Saripalli

  2. Biotechnology Division, CSIR-Institute of Himalayan and Bioresource Technology, Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India

    Vijay Gahlaut

  3. Department of Biotechnology, University Center for Research and Development, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, Mohali, Punjab, India

    Vijay Gahlaut

  4. Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Tinku Gautam & Hemant Sharma

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  1. Gautam Saripalli
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  2. Vijay Gahlaut
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  3. Tinku Gautam
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  4. Hemant Sharma
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Correspondence to Gautam Saripalli .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Crop Improvement Division, ICAR-Vivekananda Parvatiya Krishi Anusandhan Sansthan, Almora, Uttarakhand, India

    Devender Sharma

  2. Department of Vegetable Science, Rani Lakshmi Bai Central Agricultural University, Jhansi, India

    Saurabh Singh

  3. Division of Plant Pathology, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India

    Susheel K. Sharma

  4. ICAR-Central Potato Research Institute, Shimla, India

    Rajender Singh

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Saripalli, G., Gahlaut, V., Gautam, T., Sharma, H. (2023). Epigenetics for Crop Improvement: Challenges and Opportunities with Emphasis on Wheat. In: Sharma, D., Singh, S., Sharma, S.K., Singh, R. (eds) Smart Plant Breeding for Field Crops in Post-genomics Era . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8218-7_13

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