Prebreeding in sugarcane with an emphasis on the programme of the Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute.

Abstract

The most salient features of prebreeding and germplasm enhancement in sugarcane are reviewed. The main features of the Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute programme are reported.

Energy Cane: Its Concept, Development, Characteristics, and Prospects

“…The interest is productivity of total biomass, ultimately fiber. Although there are studies sustaining a negative relationship between sugar content and fiber content [22,23], Barbados' results show that this is only true in populations that have been subjected to selection for sugar producing feedstock, that is, a relatively low fiber content and a sugar content as high as possible. In unselected populations of F1 seedlings the correlation between fiber and Brix in juice was between 0.142 and 0.160 whereas in the highly selected clones at Stage 4 this correlation was invariably negative and in the range of 0.3 to 0.5 (Kennedy, personal communication).…”

“…Considering all the variabilities still available in that species, along with that in the Saccharum Complex, there are immense possibilities of new gene arrangements, probably not paralleled by any other group of plants. For the conventional sugarcane breeders there is no doubt that the challenges are great [23,26,130], as sucrose accumulation in the stalks and the production of high biomass yield may be difficult to achieve within the conventional sugarcane germplasm [24,41]. However, the work in Barbados suggests that this apparent negative association can be broken if a wide genetic base is used, followed by a long recurrent program [110].…”

“…Mauritius also developed a similar program [23]. However, in those programs, as with the pioneer work in Puerto Rico, they selected a type of cane which is producing more biomass and fiber but is still exploited in conventional sugar mills (Type I), producing syrup for ethanol production and surplus bagasse to be used in cogeneration.…”

“…The species Saccharum officinarum is noted for its capacity to divert an exceptionally high proportion of photoassimilates to sucrose and store it in the culms ( [20], cited in [21]). However, a favorable partition between sugar and fiber for facilitating mill extraction, high sucrose and low fiber (e.g., [21][22][23]), has been one of the significant constraints in the sugarcane breeding: backcrossing to S. officinarum, the sugary and low fiber ancestral species, reduces overall vigor 2 Advances in Botany and so, the varieties are more susceptible to stresses and diseases and, consequently, the productivity is restricted. The potential field productivity of sugarcane is known to be nearly 400 tons of fresh biomass per hectare per year in optimum conditions, but the world commercial average productivity is less than 25% of that value (e.g., [13,14,16,[24][25][26]).…”

The Biotechnology Roadmap for Sugarcane Improvement

“…Most yield gains are due to exploiting genotype by environment interaction, which is not well understood for sugarcane. With the view to assure long term improvements arising from genetic breeding, new (exotic) germplasm should be incorporated into current programs, e.g., through pre-breeding programs to accelerate the mobilization of non-adapted material (Ramdoyal and Badaloo 2002;Hemaprabha et al 2005) In the next years, high-throughput sequencing will exponentially increase the amount of molecular markers available for molecular breeding. Initial efforts in sequencing the sugarcane genome will be used as a scaffold for resequencing projects that will make SNPs identification cheaper and faster.…”