Biotechnology: An Advanced Tool for Crop Improvement

Abstract

Plant breeding is mainly concerned with genetic improvement of crops through hybridization, screening and selection of advance lines. The conventional methods give advance varieties with desirable traits but take consume more time (6 to 12 years) to achieve. Biotechnology tools makes breeding methods more advance by reducing the time to get improved varieties. Other than conventional methods varietal advancement can be achieved by applying plant tissue culture, transgenic approaches and molecular breeding methods. Crop improvement by using biotechnology approaches is mostly concerned with protoplast fusion to get somatic hybrids, gene transfer to get genetically modified organisms and use of DNA markers to select trait of interests. Variety with improved biotic and abiotic stress resistance can be developed in less time and more accuracy using recent biotechnological approaches. Several advance tools are being utilized for that purpose including, nanotechnology, bioinformatics tools offers new era of genomics assisted molecular breeding. Next Generation Sequencing and high throughput genotyping approaches are increasing efficiency and output of biotechnological tools in agriculture. Current review focused on overview of biotechnological tools being applied for crop improvement.

Integrating speed breeding with artificial intelligence for developing climate-smart crops

“…Unlike cereals, GAB has also led to the identification of QTLs in underutilized legume crops such as cyst nematode ( Heterodera glycines ) in Glycine max and rust resistance ( Puccinia arachidis ) in Arachis hypogaea [ 29 , 31 ]. In addition, GAB has also been used to unravel QTLs associated with abiotic stress tolerance in plants and QTLs related to nutritional quality traits [ 32 ]. GAB has successfully identified QTLs associated with salt stress and drought stress in plants which has been exploited in the breeding programs for developing new and improved cultivars [ 32 ].…”

Ca2+/Calmodulin Complex Triggers CAMTA Transcriptional Machinery Under Stress in Plants: Signaling Cascade and Molecular Regulation

“…The demand for ever-increasing food supply has put forth a tremendous pressure on the agriculture sector. The advent of new biotechnological tools and techniques has robustly contributed to crop improvement and horticultural science ( Limera et al, 2017 ; Adlak et al, 2019 ). In this regard, several TFs, including CAMTA, had been identified and functionally characterized.…”

Encapsulation of Nodal Segments for Propagation and Short-term Storage of Giloe (Tinospora cordifolia Willd.): A Medicinally Important Plant Species

“…Conservation strategies need to be adopted for continuous supply to meet the ever-increasing demands and sustainable utilization of resources. Plant cell, tissue and organ culture techniques is proving very convenient to solve these problems [4,5]. It could be employed for massive in vitro propagation [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], synthetic seed production [14,15], raising embryogenic cell suspension cultures [16,17,18,19,20,21,22], production of useful secondary metabolites [23,24,25] in vitro selection in conjunction with somaclonal variation against different biotic [26,27] and abiotic [28] stresses including quality improvement [29].…”