LAGANDEEP KAUR, RAHUL KAPOOR, HARPREET KAUR OBEROI, SIMRAN SINGH AND PRITI SHARMA
Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141004 (Punjab), India School of Agricultural Biotechnology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141004 (Punjab), India
*(e-mail: harpreetoberoi@pau.edu)
(Received : 11 Februry 2026; Accepted : 30 March 2026)
SUMMARY
Oats (Avena sativa L.), being important rabi season and self-pollinating cereal crop, ranked sixth in the world cereal production after wheat, maize, rice, barley and sorghum belonging to the family graminae and hexaploid in nature used worldwide as multipurpose grain, pasture and forage crop. In every aspect, it has an excellent percentage of nutritional components, i.e. starch, rich in proteins and dietary fibres mainly â-glucan content, phytochemicals, trace minerals i.e. calcium and iron and vitamins which makes an oat being a superior choice for consumption by humans as well as animals. Moreover, it is highly succulent and palatable crop. The current issue faced by the oats is changing climatic behavior that is resulting into biotic and abiotic stresses. A wide range of desirable QTLs are degenerating due to the negative impact of climate. This review majorly highlight the biotic stresses and breeding strategies in order to inculcate the resilient traits of interest from wild relatives of oats into cultivated ones. Oats breeding lags behind the other major cereals because of its hexaploid nature and modern breeding technologies mainly Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS), Genome Wide Association Studies for stress tolerance (GWAS), Genome Editing Strategies such as CRISPR-Cas 9 have very vast scope in oats breeding and should be used to enhance the oats value and productivity like all other cereal crops.
Key words: Oats, biotic stresses, crop wild relative, molecular markers, CRISPR/Cas9