Theor Appl Genet. 2021 Jan 12.
Pea (Pisum sativum L.), a cool-season legume crop grown in more than 85 countries, is the second most important grain legume and one of the major green vegetables in the world. While pea was historically studied as the genetic model leading to the discovery of the laws of genetics, pea research has lagged behind that of other major legumes in the genomics era, due to its large and complex genome. The evolving climate change and growing population have posed grand challenges to the objective of feeding the world, making it essential to invest research efforts to develop multi-omics resources and advanced breeding tools to support fast and continuous development of improved pea varieties. Recently, the pea researchers have achieved key milestones in omics and molecular breeding. The present review provides an overview of the recent important progress including the development of genetic resource databases, high-throughput genotyping assays, reference genome, genes/QTLs responsible for important traits, transcriptomic, proteomic, and phenomic atlases of various tissues under different conditions. These multi-faceted resources have enabled the successful implementation of various markers for monitoring early-generation populations as in marker-assisted backcrossing breeding programs. The emerging new breeding approaches such as CRISPR, speed breeding, and genomic selection are starting to change the paradigm of pea breeding. Collectively, the rich omics resources and omics-enable breeding approaches will enhance genetic gain in pea breeding and accelerate the release of novel pea varieties to meet the elevating demands on productivity and quality.