REVIEW QTLian breeding for climate resilience in cereals: progress and prospects Mukesh Choudhary 1 & Shabir Hussain Wani 2 & Pardeep Kumar 1 & Pravin K. Bagaria 1 & Sujay Rakshit 1 & Manish Roorkiwal 3 & Rajeev K. Varshney 3 Received: 20 September 2018 /Revised: 5 April 2019 /Accepted: 30 April 2019 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The ever-rising population of the twenty-first century together with the prevailing challenges, such as deteriorating quality of arable land and water, has placed a big challenge for plant breeders to satisfy human needs for food under erratic weather patterns. Rice, wheat, and maize are the major staple crops consumed globally. Drought, waterlogging, heat, salinity, and mineral toxicity are the key abiotic stresses drastically affecting crop yield. Conventional plant breeding approaches towards abiotic stress tolerance have gained success to limited extent, due to the complex (multigenic) nature of these stresses. Progress in breeding climate-resilient crop plants has gained momentum in the last decade, due to improved understanding of the physiochemical and molecular basis of various stresses. A good number of genes have been characterized for adaptation to various stresses. In the era of novel molecular markers, mapping of QTLs has emerged as viable solution for breeding crops tolerant to abiotic stresses. Therefore, molecular breeding-based development and deployment of high-yielding climate-resilient crop cultivars together with climate-smart agricul- tural practices can pave the path to enhanced crop yields for smallholder farmers in areas vulnerable to the climate change. Advances in fine mapping and expression studies integrated with cheaper prices offer new avenues for the plant breeders engaged in climate-resilient plant breeding, and thereby, hope persists to ensure food security in the era of climate change. Keywords Climate resilience . Molecular breeding . QTL . SNPs . Genomic selection . Cereals . Genotyping by sequencing . Food security Introduction The prediction of a global population of 9.6 billion by 2050 poses a tough challenge to plant breeders, to satisfy the human need in a sustainable manner (UNU-IHDP 2014). Urbanization has led to shrinking land availability, and climate change coupled with population growth will threaten global food secu- rity. Climate change is expected to expose countries, particularly Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-019-00684-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Shabir Hussain Wani shabirhussainwani@gmail.com Mukesh Choudhary mukesh.choudhary1@icar.gov.in Pardeep Kumar pardeepkumar656@gmail.com Pravin K. Bagaria pravin87hau@gmail.com Sujay Rakshit s.rakshit@icar.gov.in Manish Roorkiwal M.Roorkiwal@cgiar.org Rajeev K. Varshney R.K.Varshney@cgiar.org 1 ICAR-Indian Institute of Maize Research, Ludhiana, India 2 Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops-Khudwani, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir , Shalimar, Srinagar 190025, Jammu and Kashmir, India 3 Center of Excellence in Genomics and Systems Biology, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Greater Hyderabad, Telangana, India Functional & Integrative Genomics https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-019-00684-1