Pest and diseases: Old and new threats – Modern breeding tools to tailor new crop cultivars

Full yield potential of any crop cannot be harnessed completely due to several such as biotic and abiotic, faced by the crops at various growth stages. stresses caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi, pathogen, parasites, pests and pose major threat to sustainable productivity by reducing yield from 30% in to complete yield loss in some severe epidemic cases. Crop protection for safe-guarding crops such as use of synthetic pesticides, weedicides, etc. largely beenlielpFul in curtailing the losses, however, their haphazard use have adverse environmental and health hazards. Genetic alternatives such as /pyramiding of genes/auantitative trait loci associated with resistance target pest and diseases, on the otner hand, is much ecological and eco-friendly . Although, there are several biotic stress agents for any crop, however, only few pests or diseases cause major yield loss. It is beyond the scope of this review to all the pests and diseases affecting all the crops, thereby, focus has been given major pests and diseases of representative crops such as rice (cereal), chickpea (legume) and tomato (vegetable). Special emphasis has been given on the current and future prospects of deploying modern breeding approaches for developing cultivars with high resilience to major biotic stresses in order to achieve genetic yield potential in all the crops.