Enhancing resistance to finger millet blast using traditional and molecular approaches and outlook for future possibilities

The biodiversity of agricultural pests and diseases has changed significantly due to climate change, posing an immense challenge to sustainable crop production. Finger millet, the third most important millet, is typically cultivated in arid, semi-arid, hilly and tribal provinces across Africa and Asia. However, its growth and yield are severely threatened by blast disease, a destructive condition caused by the filamentous ascomycete fungus Magnaporthe grisea. Because the pathogen produces rapidly evolving virulence genes, blast resistance frequently breaks down, leading to yield instability in all provinces where finger millet is cultivated. Blast disease is estimated to reduce yield by 28 %–36 % on average and in extreme cases, it can result in total crop loss. The disease affects the crop in three progressive stages: leaf blast, neck blast and finger blast. In comparison to leaf blast, the loss is higher in neck blast and finger blast, which drastically decrease grain size and number and in extreme cases, this results in total panicle sterility. In this current review, we emphasized the significance of finger millet and its susceptibility to blast disease, pathogen, field screening technique, genetic resources available at different research organizations involved in the advancement of finger millet in the world, genetic diversity of blast pathogen, conventional and molecular tools like transcriptome analysis and transgenesis that have been employed to increase finger millet's resistance to blast disease and explored prospective future paths for the creation of new blast-resistant finger millet cultivars.