Advances in Marker-Assisted Selection in Crop Breeding

 Rajesh Singh1, RK Singh2

1Genetics and Plant Breeding, IAS, BHU, Varanasi-221005

2Assistant Director General (Commercial Crops), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Krishi Bhavan, New Delhi

Received: 05 January 2017                              Revised Accepted: 20 March 2017

ABSTRACT

Marker-assisted selection (MAS) is gaining  importance day by day,  as it would improve the efficiency of plant breeding through precise transfer of genomic regions of interest ‘foreground selection’ and accelerating the recovery of the original  genome ‘background selection’. MAS for simply inherited traits are more widely employed than MAS for complex traits. The success of MAS depends upon several factors, like the number of target genes to be transferred, the distance between the flanking markers and the target gene, the number of genotypes selected in each breeding generation, the nature of germplasm and the technical options available at the marker level. With the knowedge of third generation marker technologies such as the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), the power and efficiency of genotyping are expected to improve in the coming decades. The present review discusses the basic requirements and the potential applications of MAS in crop plants, the design parameters in a MAS scheme, recent developments in MAS strategies and genotyping techniques, and the significance of integrating MAS into conventional plant breeding.

Key Words: Marker-assisted selection (MAS), Plant breeding, Qualitative traits, Quantitative trait loci (QTL)