Climate change, food insecurity, and malnutrition pose significant threats to the global
population. Malnutrition, unhealthy diets, and lifestyle disorders are pervasive in both developed
and developing nations, contributing to chronic diseases. A promising solution lies in cultivating
future smart food crops with traits such as short duration, low water requirement, high water use
efficiency, drought and heat tolerance, and positive response to elevated CO 2 levels. Millets
possess these qualities, making them ideal candidates for ensuring food security and nutrition.
Gluten-free and nutritionally dense, millets are resilient to climate variations and well-suited to
low soil fertility, supporting food security, livestock feed needs and nutrition. Despite their
potential, millets are underutilized globally. Globally considerable germplasm has been
conserved in ex-situ genebanks for sorghum (259,595), pearl millet (73,578), finger millet
(43,862), foxtail millet (46,368), and proso millet (29,865), and while other small millets have
relatively fewer accessions (8,920 for barnyard millet, 4,398 for kodo millet, 3,734 for little
millet, 8,305 for teff and 1,170 for fonio). Genetic resources including landraces, wild species
accessions, advanced breeding lines, diversity subsets (core and mini core collections), FIGS
sets, NAM, BC-NAM population, biparental mapping populations, mutant populations, etc.
increase access to germplasm diversity for trait discovery and use in breeding cultivars. Diversity
(core and mini core collections), trait-specific subsets are available for most millets, while other
specialized sets are not available for most millets. ICRISAT genebank has developed core
collection for the eight millets and the number of accessions in the core collection range from
2246 in sorghum to 56 accessions little millet, and mini core collection are available for sorghum
(242 accessions), pearl millet (238 accessions), finger millet (80 accessions), and foxtail millet
(35 accessions), and these core and mini core collections have been evaluated extensively for
various agronomic, quality, and stress tolerance traits and promising sources were identified for
use in crop improvement. So far, genome sequences of most millets are available, including for
sorghum, pearl millet, foxtail millet, proso millet, Japanese barnyard millet, teff, fonio and Job’s
tear. Genotyping and trait discovery are largely conducted in sorghum, pearl millet, and foxtail
millet, whereas substantial interventions are required for other millets. With the recent advances
in phenotyping and genomics technologies, along with diversity present in germplasm, there is
an opportunity to trait mining in the genebank collection and their utilization of millets
improvement.