Plant Genetic Resources for Climate Smart Crops and Human Health.

Food and nutritional security is of utmost importance due to climate change and variability. Crop adaptation is one of the major challenges to scientific community in the 21^st century. Nearly one billion people are malnourished. Plant genetic resources are important resource for future genetic progress and an insurance against unforeseen threats to production. ICRISAT genebank houses over 123,000 germplasm accessions of its mandate crops and small millets from 144 countries. These germplasm contain traits that plant breeders will need for developing climate resilient crop cultivars. Representative core and mini core collections have been developed for our mandate crops (sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea, and groundnut) and small millets as resource to discover new sources of variations for enhanced use of germplasm in crop breeding. To date, 257 sets of mini core collection have been distributed to scientists in 35 countries. Using these resources, trait-specific genetically diverse germplasm possessing agronomically beneficial traits have been identified, and made available to researchers globally. There has been increased use of germplasm in breeding programs at ICRISAT since formation of mini core collections. Our crops have abundant genomic resources, including availability of reference genomes sequences in some crops. Germplasm and breeding lines with unique traits are being sequenced, and comparison of sequence information with reference genome will enable us associate sequence variation with agronomically beneficial traits for use in crop breeding. Crop wild relatives harbor genes for resistance to pest and diseases, and for agronomic and nutritional traits. Efforts are on to transfer resistance to pod borer in chickpea and pigeonpea, while synthetics in groundnut are being used to capture variations lost during domestication. Increased use of agrobiodiversity together with modern genomics tools is crucial to coping with new challenges to agricultural production.