Application of Genomics and Phenomics in Plant Breeding for Climate Resilience

Advances in the fields of genomics and phenomics are currently creating significant foundations for the sustainable intensification of plant breeding initiatives targeting climate resilience. Genomics is a biological study that focuses on architecture, function, editing, mapping, and evolution of genomes. It can be applied extensively in climate resilience breeding for cost-effective, rapid, and high-through put genotyping, phenotyping, and trait mapping. The efficacy of genomics-assisted breeding (GAB) is strongly hinged on the high resolution and robustness of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and CRISPR/Cas9-based Gene Editing systems. The integration of genomics and phenomics in crop improvement can upscale the efficiency of breeding systems targeting climate resilience and hasten cultivar release cycle. Phenomics is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the enhanced measurement of plant performance, growth, and composition. Similarly, phenomics has revolutionized the efficacy of plant breeding off-trial initiatives established to phenotypically characterize and study diversity levels of collected germplasm. Field phenomics tools such as the phenonet, phenomobile, and phenonetwork have proven to be efficient in capturing large sums of multiscale and multidimensional experimental data. The main purpose of this review article is to present a summarized account of the probable applications of integrated systems of genomics and phenomics in plant breeding for climate resilience in major crops.