Augmentation of crop productivity through interventions of omics technologies in India: challenges and opportunities

With the continuous increase in the population of developing countries and decline of natural resources, there is an urgent need to qualitatively and quantitatively augment crop productivity by using new tools and technologies for improvement of agriculturally important traits. The new scientific and technological omics-based approaches have enabled us to deal with several issues and challenges faced by modern agricultural system and provided us novel opportunities for ensuring food and nutritional security. Recent developments in sequencing techniques have made available huge amount of genomic and transcriptomic data on model and cultivated crop plants including Arabidopsis thaliana, Oryza sativa, Triticum aestivum etc. The sequencing data along with other data generated through several omics platforms have significantly influenced the disciplines of crop sciences. Gene discovery and expression profiling-based technologies are offering enormous opportunities to the scientific community which can now apply marker-assisted selection technology to assess and enhance diversity in their collected germplasm, introgress essential traits from new sources and investigate genes that control key traits of crop plants. Utilization of omics science and technologies for crop productivity, protection and management has recently been receiving a lot of attention; the majority of the efforts have been put into signifying the possible applications of various omics technologies in crop plant sciences. This article highlights the background of challenges and opportunities for augmentation of crop productivity through interventions of omics technologies in India.