Recent Advances in Omics Approaches for Mungbean Improvement

Mungbean is the most important legume crop among the genus Vigna. It is widely cultivated in South-East Asian continents. It is grown throughout the year in different warm temperatures and tropical regions of India and other countries as well. It has easily digestible proteins along with the other micro-nutrients. Therefore, it is used as food, feed, forage, green manure and cover crop. It also improves soil health through the symbiotic association of Rhizobia. Keeping the importance of mungbean, it is still affected by various biotic and abiotic stresses. A modest effort has been made by several researchers and some extent of success was also noticed. Now, molecular breeding is more sound after decoding the whole genome sequence data of mungbean. Various genes/QTLs were also tagged and mapped for many important traits like yellow mosaic disease, powdery mildew, Cercospora leaf spot, and leaf shape. A very recently, the bruchid-resistant gene was also mapped. Besides the genomics, the transcriptome data for various traits like desiccation tolerance and root traits are also available. Some of the linked markers are reported by researchers based on mungbean genome sequence and other related legumes, which will be useful for mungbean improvement. Nevertheless, the use of molecular breeding tools still lag in mungbean due to unavailability of the robust marker validation, and therefore need special attention. The recent advancements in omics approaches after six years of decoding the genome sequence and the significant achievements made in mungbean have been discussed in this chapter.