"No plant is an island too…" Plants, though sessile, have developed a unique strategy to counter biotic and abiotic stresses by symbiotically co-evolving with microorganisms and tapping into their genome for this purpose. Soil is the bank of microbial diversity from which a plant selectively sources its microbiome to suit its needs. Besides soil, seeds, which carry the genetic blueprint of plan...

How can disciplinary research in physiology complement wheat breeding? This introductory chapter is intended to provide broad guidelines to help breeding programs: 1) assess whether physiological criteria should be included in a breeding strategy; 2) evaluate specific physiological selection traits and determine their usefulness in breeding. The other chapters in this book provide more explicit...

Genomic Selection (GS) is a new breeding method in which genome-wide markers are used to predict the breeding value of individuals in a breeding population. GS has been shown to improve breeding efficiency in dairy cattle and several crop plant species, and here we evaluate for the first time its efficacy for breeding inbred lines of rice. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in ...

There has been a great increase in breeding work on cool season turfgrass cultivars since the Plant Variety Protection (P.V.P.) Act was signed into law in December, 1970. This law, which is similar to the Plant Patent Law except that it covers sexual and asexual species, permits the developer of a new cultivar to exclude others from any unauthorized reproduction or marketing. This does not excl...

Variability in breeding programmes for self-fertilised crops is created by crossing, and if the value of the crosses cannot be predicted in advance then this uncertainty means that a strategy of making many crosses is appropriate. However, since there is a limit to the capacity of a breeding programme, the more crosses that are made the smaller the size of each cross (F2 population size or numb...

School for Biotechnology, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Jammu, Chatha, Jammu-180009Jammu & Kashmir, India Division of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, Shalimar, Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir-190025, India Division of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural ...

SNPs in genes functional in starch-sugar interconversion associate with natural variation of tuber starch 1 and sugar content of potato (Solanum tuberosum L). 2 L. Schreiber , A. C. Nader-Nieto , E. M. Schönhals, B. Walkemeier, C. Gebhardt 3 Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, 50829 Cologne, Germany 4 *The two first authors equally contri...

Introduction of apomixis, asexual reproduction through seeds, into crop species has the potential to dramatically transform plant breeding. A new study demonstrates that traits can be stably transferred between generations in newly produced apomictic lines, and heralds a breeding revolution needed to increase food production for the growing planet.

Genome doubling (polyploidization) has played a major role in the evolution and diversification of the plant kingdom and is regarded as an important mechanism of speciation and adaptation in plants (Otto & Whitton, 2000). The term ploidy refers to the number of basic chromosome sets (represented by ‘x’) present in a somatic plant cell (2n) or gamete (n). Scaling whole sets of chromosomes up or ...