Omics approaches and abiotic stress tolerance in legumes - Legumes Under Environmental Stress: Yield, Improvement and Adaptations - page 227

13.10 Conclusions and future
prospects

plants. Results obtained from model legumes can be
extrapolated to commercially important legume species
and thus be used for guiding future research.

Ranking third in global crop production, legumes are
significant for the food security of humans and live-
stock globally. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that
the yield of the legume crops is adequately high. A
major challenge to legume improvement programmes
is that the productivity and availability of legume crops
is hindered by two major limiting factors: biotic and
abiotic stresses. Biotechnological approaches, including
all the 'omics', have great potential to help circumvent
abiotic stress-related issues. For gene discovery to
step up, progress in bioinformatics and sequencing is
required. Such advances will ensure the availability of
the sequenced genomes of model legumes, along with
the possibility of next generation sequencing, thereby
increasing the potential to greatly facilitate the 'omics'
approaches. Advances in these omics techniques,
including those described here, will in turn help illu-
minate the genetic structure of legumes and thereby
allow the full deployment of genetic resources for
legume improvement. For instance, a number of useful
tools such as sequence assembly, transformation sys-
tems and genomic DNA libraries have been developed
following the release of the genome sequences of
important model plants, namely Lotus japonicus , Glycine
max , Medicago truncatula , Cajanus cajan and Cicer arieti-
num. Although soybean has been extensively studied
and tolerant varieties of chickpea and peanut have
been subjected to studies in response to abiotic stress
conditions, proteomics studies in legumes are very
limited thus demarcating a potential target for
improvement (Reddy et al., 2012). Comprehensive
approaches, comprising the quantitative and qualitative
analysis of gene expression products, are also necessary
at the transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic
levels for better elucidation of the functioning of
genomes and their genes (Gupta et al., 2014). In other
words, in order to apply the omics techniques to
legumes, information should be obtained on the abi-
otic stress responses at a molecular level, ranging from
gene to protein, metabolic pathways and finally the
phenotypic effect. The essence of the outcome of
experiments with the above-mentioned techniques is
the identification of key factors (genes) involved in
stress responses. Following identification and valida-
tion, these candidate genes can then be used as genetic
markers or employed in the production of transgenic

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