Sesame improvement: traditional breeding to genomics-assisted breeding

Although sesame is an important oilseed crop, its production is significantly hindered by several factors, including capsule shattering and susceptibility to environmental stresses. To increase the sesame production, it is urged to develop high-yielding cultivars with shattering resistance and stress resilience. Traditional breeding alone is insufficient to develop such varieties, as it is less precise, time-consuming, and inappropriate for complex traits like yield, abiotic and biotic stress tolerance/resistance. To address these, genomics-assisted breeding (GAB) might be a valuable technique to assist conventional breeding, as it offers genomic tools such as molecular markers, genomic selection, genome sequencing, etc., to effectively identify, select, and combine useful alleles in sesame. When it is integrated with traditional breeding, developing sesame varieties with precise and fast selection for traits, including abiotic/biotic stress tolerance/resistance, and higher yield becomes possible. This review aims to explore the gaps (slow, inefficient, environment-dependent, etc.) in traditional breeding in sesame and simultaneously document the benefits of genomics-assisted breeding to overcome these barriers with recent advancements in sesame. Moreover, the major constraints of sesame improvements will be discussed, and later, a new possible combined model by integrating conventional and genomics-assisted breeding will be suggested to speed up the breeding cycle, with challenges and future outlook towards adopting a multi-omics approach, installing advanced technologies, interoperable applications, etc., to develop climate-resilient sesame varieties.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11032-026-01654-9.