The Role of Transcriptomics in Crop Improvement: A Review

Traditional breeding methods have been practiced for years, while more contemporary initiatives using markers-assisted breeding have made significant advancements that have helped us meet the world's food demands. With the depletion of natural resources, the threat of population growth, and the effects of climatic change, the demand for food will be extremely high in the future. But with urgent needs for food and other farm related produce, there is an extreme need to utilize genomic resources for precise crop breeding fully. Plant breeding can benefit in integrating transcriptome studies to improve crops as well as enables the exploration of regulatory networks and whole genome expression patterns, which help in revealing novel stress tolerance associated genes in crop plants. Transcriptome studies can effectively link the phenotype with the genotypes of the observed traits, regardless of the genome availability and/or complexity of the crops facilitating the practical selection of superior genotypes for us.