Effects of biotic stresses and their mitigation strategies in legumes: A review

Legumes are crucial group of crops that are widely cultivated around the world for their protein rich seed and forage. The major impediments for boosting the output of legume crops are biotic and abiotic stresses. There is an urgent need to lessen the detrimental effects of these stresses on legume crops in order to boost the yield and production of legumes to address the nation’s nutritional security issue. An attempt was made to gather published information on effects of biotic stress and mitigation strategies for developing resistant genotypes to maximize yield. This work was done at Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, School of Agriculture, Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar in collaboration with other institutes. Systematic cum integrative review of research work done in different parts of World, particularly in India was comprehended. The literature search was done during August, 2022-February, 2023. About 150 review and research papers were screened from various data bases like ARCC journals, google scholar, research gate and scopus and 76 papers were used to write this paper. This review article presents a comprehensive documentation of the significant impacts of various biotic stresses on legume crops, along with the corresponding mitigation techniques. It highlights the potential effectiveness of integrating the pre-breeding approach with genomic breeding methods as a strategy for developing high-yielding cultivars that exhibit resistance to biotic stresses. By implementing this approach, legume productivity can be enhanced in regions with favourable growth conditions for these crops.