Accentuating genetic gain in chickpea: Research gaps and future artifice

Chickpea (Cicerarietinum L.) is an essential grain legume crop in several developing countries, especially in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Indian subcontinent, but its production potential could not be realised across the chickpea growing regions primarily due to environmental stresses. Chickpea global average yield for 2021 was 1.1 tonnes/ha, while the yield potential of chickpea varieties varies from 2 to 5 tonnes/ha under optimal growing conditions. Self-pollinating behaviour of chickpea has narrowed its genetic base, and particularly rare alleles are gradually being lost through selection processes before and after domestication. To address this problem, new crop improvement strategies are being implemented to increase chickpea yields and their resistance to environmental challenges. Traditional breeding procedures are insufficient to meet crop production demand for the growing population. Therefore, the modern breeding tools and molecular techniques are being investigated to bring in unique features into the modern chickpea cultivars to combat climate change and its impacts. Wild Cicer species are rich sources of novel and desired traits. The use of new breeding strategies in chickpea, such as precision high-throughput phenotyping, speed breeding, pangenome approach, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), genomic selection (GS), genome editing, and other omics studies, is expected to boost chickpea productivity and reduce breeding cycles by selecting new desirable traits much more rapidly than traditional methods. In this review, we have provided an overview of different strategies for chickpea sustainable development and examined their potential and limitations.