Breeder's needs - conventional versus molecular breeding in grain legumes
2008
Imtiaz, M., International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, Aleppo (Syria)
Conventional plant breeding (CPB) exploits natural environments to breed new varieties of crops to suit different agro ecological conditions cope with biotic or abiotic stresses better, improve nutritional value, and use water or nutrients more efficiently. Besides tremendous achievements in crop improvement through phenotypic selection, significant difficulties are often encountered in phenotypic selection, such as genotype by environmental interaction, and expensive, unreliable and time consuming screening methodologies for target traits. With the advent of molecular biology, the term molecular breeding (MB) has been introduced which is the application of genomic tools such as molecular markers to facilitate CPB at critical stages of varietal development. Grain legumes breeders desire to use MB to significantly reduce time to develop a new variety, have more effective and direct control of the alleles retained and discarded, access to new genes that may provide greater diversity, and avoid genotype-environment interaction. For the grain legume industry to integrate new technologies into CPB efforts, there is strong need to: link the genomic resources and theoretic knowledge available with application in practical breeding through consultation among molecular biologist, pre-breeder, and breeders to define breeding objectives; establish a common forum for legumes scientists such as website to have free access to genomics and other genetic resources; develop understanding among scientists in which the ultimate goal is to produce better varieties faster which are acceptable to farmers and other end users.
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