Molecular breeding

About: Molecular breeding is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2120 publications have been published within this topic receiving 56908 citations.

Rice Breeding in Vietnam: Retrospects, Challenges and Prospects

Abstract: Rice breeding was conducted for a long time during historical times and is an important job in Vietnam because rice is the major food for domestic consumption and export. In this review, we have provided a comprehensive insight into the importance of promising rice germplasm resources, breeding achievements, and breeding approaches as well as discussed challenges and perspectives of rice breeding in this country. With rice germplasm and wild rice relative resources with rich and various genetic diversity, their useful genes and traits have been exploited and integrated into commercial varieties as the final outputs of rice breeding programs. New achievements of the modern genetics era have been approached and effectively contributed to breeding activities in this country. Genome sequences, molecular breeding, and mutation are powerful tools and playing vital roles in developing new varieties with characteristics of interest that should be followed by the current market demands. In the last decades, there has been a plethora of newly generated varieties by Vietnamese scientists and rice breeders and approved by the state authorities. However, very few domestic mega varieties have prevailed over the imported varieties. Therefore, rice breeding in this country is faced with big challenges, including limitations of backgrounds, budgets, and even talents in basic research to compete with other rice-producing countries. The target goals and long-term approaches for rice breeding should be paid explicitly in priority to ensure national food security and the advantage and development of rice breeding in this country.

Large-Scale Investigation of Soybean Gene Functions by Overexpressing a Full-Length Soybean cDNA Library in Arabidopsis.

Abstract: Molecular breeding has become an important approach for crop improvement, and a prerequisite for molecular breeding is elucidation of the functions of genetic loci or genes. Soybean is one of the most important food and oil crops worldwide. However, due to the difficulty of genetic transformation in soybean, studies of its functional genomics lag far behind those of other crops such as rice, which severely impairs the progress of molecular improvement in soybean. Here, we describe an effective large-scale strategy to investigate the functions of soybean genes via overexpression of a full-length soybean cDNA library in Arabidopsis. The overexpression vector pJL12 was modified for use in the construction of a normalized full-length cDNA library. The constructed cDNA library showed good quality; repetitive clones represented approximately 4%, insertion fragments were approximately 2.2 kb, and the full-length rate was approximately 98%. This cDNA library was then overexpressed in Arabidopsis, and approximately 2000 transgenic lines were preliminarily obtained. Phenotypic analyses of the positive T1 transgenic plants showed that more than 5% of the T1 transgenic lines displayed abnormal developmental phenotypes, and approximately 1% of the transgenic lines exhibited potentially favorable traits. We randomly amplified 4 genes with obvious phenotypes (enlarged seeds, yellowish leaves, more branches, and dense siliques) and repeated the transgenic analyses in Arabidopsis. Subsequent phenotypic observation demonstrated that these phenotypes were indeed due to the overexpression of soybean genes. We believe our strategy represents an effective large-scale approach to investigate the functions of soybean genes and further reveal genes favorable for molecular improvement in soybean.

Molecular Breeding for Tolerance to Abiotic/Edaphic Stresses in Forage and Turfgrass

Abstract: Perennial grasses will always be subject to fluctuating multiple environmental and soil-related stresses. In most cases, from 100–1000 genes must function to activate the mechanisms governing these stresses. The first target of both conventional and biotechnology breeding efforts should be focused on root system improvement. The first line of defense in grass plant adaptation to these stresses is root plasticity (functional root volume maintenance and viability under cyclic stresses). As stress tolerance mechanisms are better understood, gene technology can be integrated with traditional breeding strategies to locate, sequence, clone, and comparatively map stress-responsive genes, hopefully leading to specific-trait marker assisted selection and overall multiple stress tolerance enhancement in forage and turfgrasses.

Development of New SSR (Simple Sequence Repeat) Markers for Lentils (Lens culinaris Medik.) from Genomic Library Enriched with AG and AC Microsatellites

Abstract: Simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers are the major molecular tools for genetic and genomic researches that have been extensively developed and used in major crops. However, few are available for lentils (Lens culinaris M.), economically an important cool-season legume. The lack of informative simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers in lentil has been a major limitation for lentil molecular breeding studies. Therefore, in order to develop SSR markers for lentil, an enriched genomic libraries for AC and AG repeats were constructed from the Lens culinaris cv Kafkas. A total of 350 clones were inquired for the detection of SSRs. Of 350 clones, 68 had SSR motifs. In polymorphism analysis using 53 newly developed SSRs, a total of 144 alleles across 24 lentil cultivars were detected with an average of 4.64 per locus. The average heterozygosity was 0.588 and polymorphism information contents ranged from 0.194 to 0.895 with an average value of 0.520. These newly developed SSRs will constitute useful tools for molecular breeding, mapping, and assessments of genetic diversity and population structure of lentils.