Plant Breeding: Past, Present, and Future

Evolution of plant breeding

“…The competitive nature of private enterprises will ensure that resources are made available to compete in the marketplace. Although the level of financial resources allocated to plant breeding has rapidly increased during the past 30 years, the investments have had favorable returns (Crosbie et al 2006). Rapid progress also has been made in many nongenetic areas, such as plot equipment, computer systems for recording field data, field designs, statistical analyses, defining target environments, etc, have contributed significantly to increasing the efficiency of plant and progeny selection, or determining the breeding values for data taken at the phenotypic level (Hallauer and Pandey 2006).…”

Genomics-Assisted Plant Breeding in the 21st Century: Technological Advances and Progress

“…A vast majority of those publications were from academia. Although private sector does not normally release the details of their breeding methodologies to public domain, several articles on successful application of MAS in the development of varieties of maize (Ragot et al, 2007) and soybean (Cahill and Schmidt, 2004;Crosbie et al, 2003) came mainly from industry. Fairly low impact of academic research in developing varieties using MAS can be explained by the lack of funding to complete the entire marker development pipeline (MDP), which can be long-term and cost-intensive task.…”

Sustainable Rice Yield in Water-Short Drought-Prone Environments: Conventional and Molecular Approaches

“…MARS is highly useful in breeding combinations of traits, including grain yield under drought, yield potential under non-stress conditions, disease-insect resistance/tolerance, and grain quality characteristics. This approach has been successfully used in maize (Johnson, 2004;Crosbie et al, 2006). We have initiated programs to apply MARS for improving drought tolerance in rice at IRRI.…”