Utilizing modern techniques and omics technologies to enhance stress tolerance in finger millet, with recent findings: A review

• Finger millet, a vital food security crop is capable of thriving in harsh environmental conditions. • The CRISPR/Cas system enhances finger millet's resilience to environmental stresses. • Advanced breeding techniques improve finger millet's yield, growth rates, and disease resistance. • High-throughput omics technologies provide essential molecular insights into finger millet development. • Further research is crucial for sustainable crop improvement efforts and poverty eradication and. Finger millet (Eleusine coracana) is an important food security crop because of its nutritional properties and powerful antioxidants, which enable the plant to withstand harsh environmental conditions. In addition, research should be done on sustainable agriculture development systems for poverty eradication through finger millet production and using its genomic resources as a strategy for other crop improvements. This review focuses on the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR/Cas) systems, advanced breeding such as speed breeding, omics technologies, and how they all combined for the crop improvement strategy. CRISPR/Cas is a method used for altering genomes, specifically those of finger millets, to create cereals that can survive various environments. Also, the review discussed the genes associated with salt tolerance applied in the CRISPR/Cas genome editing technique, since salinity stress poses a great risk in agriculture fields. Plant breeding technology has contributed greatly to these achievements, such as speed breeding, genomic selection, genome editing, and high-throughput phenotyping, among others, which have improved various aspects of crops, including their yield potential and quality traits like faster growth rates, disease resistance levels, etc. High-throughput omics technologies, such as genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics, give molecular information for studying finger millet development.