Sajad Majeed Zargar¹ , Muslima Nazir² , Nancy Gupta¹ , Sufia Farhat¹ , Reetika Mahajan¹ , R K Salgotra¹ , Randeep Rakwal^3,4,5 , Ganesh Kumar Agrawal^4,5 , Rakeeb Ahmad Mir⁶

1. School of Biotechnology, S K University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Jammu, Chatha, Jammu-180009, India
2. Department of Botany, Jamia Hamdard University, Hamdard Nagar, New Delhi-110062, India
3. Organization for Educational Initiatives, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8577, Japan
4. Research Laboratory for Biotechnology and Biochemistry (RLABB), Kathmandu, Nepal
5. GRADE Academy Private Limited, Adarsh Nagar-13, Main Road, Birgunj, Nepal
6. Center for Biodiversity Studies, BGSB University, Rajouri, J&K-185234, India
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2014, Vol. 5, No. 14   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2014.05.0014
Received: 28 Sep., 2014    Accepted: 12 Oct., 2014    Published: 26 Nov., 2014

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Zargar et al., Molecular Marker Assisted Approaches (MMAA) for enhancing low water stress tolerance in Common bean: An update, Molecular Plant Breeding, 2014, Vol.5, No. 14 1-12 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2014.05.0014)

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is an important leguminous crop from the nutritional point of view, as it is rich in micronutrients as well as protein content. Drought stress is a major abiotic stress which reduces yield of crops to a major extent. Common bean is mostly cultivated under rain-fed conditions and due to very frequent droughts at the critical growth stages, there is a reduction in its average yield to a larger extent. Therefore, there is an urgent need of developing drought resistant common bean cultivars. Advances in omics approaches have opened a path to tackle many unresolved problems pertaining to crop sustainability. In this review we have discussed various options of using genomics-based approaches, mainly molecular marker assisted approaches (MMAA) to address drought tolerance in common bean. Moreover, we have also emphasized the limitations of conventional breeding approaches in tackling complex traits in crop plants.

Drought; Common bean; Molecular markers; Candidate genes; Association mapping