PUMMY KUMARI, D. S. PHOGAT, SATPAL, N. KHAROR AND SURENDER KUMAR PAHUJA
Forage Section, Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding
CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar-125 004 (Haryana), India
(e-mail: pummy.hau@gmail.com)
(Received : 2 June 2023; Accepted : 28 June 2023)
SUMMARY
Unfavourable weather conditions like extreme of temperature heat or cold, drought, salinity etc. hinder the growth and development of the plants. These abiotic stresses cause huge productivity losses and are of main concern for the agricultural scientists to meet the challenges of global food security and nutritional requirements. Since the time of the green revolution, the scientists have
been working on engineering plant mechanisms to overcome the abiotic stresses in cereals, pulses and oil seed crops to increase productivity but now it is high time to think about improvement of fodder crops. If we want to improve animal health and in turn human nutrition and health, we must use advanced genomic tools for forage crop improvement. Forage sorghum is a leading forage crop in India and improving forage sorghum for stress tolerance, forage yield and quality has great implications for farmers with small land holding. In this review paper, main focus is on forage sorghum biodiversity, its importance as forage crop, effect of climate on its morphological and quality attributes and use of advance techniques like genomics, transcript-omics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics for development of better cultivars of forage sorghum. There is ample scope for improvement of forage yield and quality of sorghum.
Key words: Forage sorghum, quality, climate resilience, molecular