Legume Breeding for Drought Tolerance Experience from the Past Using Classical Breeding Approaches

The primary environmental stressor that affects agriculture globally is drought, and one of the main goals of plant breeding is to increase production in such conditions. Legume crops like peas and chickpeas have benefited greatly from improved drought resistance thanks to classical breeding techniques. In order to create cultivars that are resistant to drought, these methods include: screening, mutation, hybridization, and marker-assisted selection. Morphological parameters are important in drought resistance breeding; in legumes for example, root characteristics like biomass and depth are critical in controlling terminal drought tolerance. When it comes to creating drought-tolerant legume varieties, the practice of genomics-assisted breeding techniques like marker-aided selection has greatly increased breeding efficiency and precision. Rice cultivars with improved drought resistance are the result of classical breeding, which focuses on biometric factors such as root depth, avoidance, escape, and tolerance. The quick production of high-yielding drought-tolerant legume varieties is facilitated by the accelerated genetic gain for drought tolerance in legumes that results from the merging of traditional breeding techniques with contemporary molecular biology tools and biometrical approaches. These methods are essential for tackling the problems caused by drought. Legumes like chickpea have benefited from enhanced drought tolerance through classical breeding techniques like hybridization and mutation, which select for desired features. Legumes’ resilience to drought has been greatly increased via classical breeding, which makes use of genetic variety and identifies important characteristics linked to stress tolerance. In order to facilitate the transfer of desirable traits to elite cultivars, this technique entails the identification of possible donors, quantitative trait loci (QTLs)/genes, and candidate genes connected to traits relevant to drought tolerance. The effective integration of drought-tolerant characteristics into legume cultivars has increased their resilience to water shortages and climate change issues due to the prudent use of molecular markers such as single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR), and Insertion–deletion mutations (INDELs). We can make a substantial contribution to sustainable agriculture by preparing legumes for drought conditions, which will lessen the effects of drought and increase global food security.