Improvement of rice variety for biotic and abiotic stress resistance using the technique of allele mining

During the crop evolution, humans were interested to select desirable plants for cultivation that leads to the bottleneck of genetic domestication. In this way, domestication and modern breeding strategies reduce the genetic variation of the crop. As a result, the modern-day breeding program concentrates only on the limited genetic resources for crop improvement. Research concentrates to increase genetic variability either by unused genetic resources or induced variation by mutation. Allele mining is one of the techniques to unlock the variation in genetic resources which remain to be the unexploited resources for various agronomic traits. Allele mining identifies the role of an allele with a phenotype that paves the way to develop allele-specific markers and these will be useful in the Molecular Breeding program. This review describes progress made in allele mining and its impact on a rice improvement program.