Marker assisted selection in plant breeding - generating large datasets for trait analysis
2009
Chiew, F. C. | Stadler, F. | Broadley, M. | Massawe, F. | Mayes, S. | Kilian, A. | Graham, N. | Roberts, J. | May, S. | Bonin, A. | Sayed Azam-Ali | Shravani B.
Marker-assisted selection has offered promise for a number of years in a wide range of crops. In some crops, such as wheat, that promise is beginning to be realised with gene specific tests for agronomically important traits, such as photoperiod. Arguably, MAS has most potential in those crop species which are most difficult to breed particularly long-generation, perennial heterozygous tree crops such as oil palm. However, the genetic dissection of traits in oil palm to identify useful molecular markers for breeding is also more difficult, with a typical trait recording cycle of ten years for all but the simplest traits. The development of a number of techniques and approaches in other crop species and in biology more generally have the potential to speed up this trait dissection and allow a more precise understanding of the underlying genetics of agronomically important traits in oil palm. High throughput technologies, such as transcriptomics, offer the potential to simultaneously analyse the expression of tens of thousands of genes at the same time and the X Species approach potentially allows us to use existing Gene Chips to work in species where they do not yet exist. The Diversity Array Technology (DArT) is a hybrid marker system which works on the basis of largely locus-specific hybridisation on a slide microarray format to generate extensive genotypic data. Combined with techniques such as the recent developments in Next Generation sequencing, these technologies offer the opportunity to elucidate genome composition and expression in a way that was unthinkable a decade ago. This paper examines some of the recent developments in marker technology that could be of value for oil palm and illustrates these with examples from our own work in other crop species.
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