Physiological and Molecular Wheat Breeding - Physiological and Molecular Wheat Breeding

Physiological and Molecular Wheat Breeding

Plant breeding has traditionally applied a trial-and-error approach in which large numbers of crosses are made from many sources of parental germplasm. Progenies are evaluated for characters of direct economic interest (e.g., grain yield and grain quality) in target environments. Good performing parental germplasm, crosses, and progenies are selected for further use or testing. In many programs "breakthroughs" in improvement are made simply by finding superior sources of parental germplasm among the numerous sources tested. This conceptually simple approach has been highly successful in many crop species and numerous breeding programs. The approach has often succeeded in the absence of in-depth knowledge about the physiological basis for superior performance. In some crops such knowledge has been obtained by doing retrospective analyses of prior genetic gains. Breeders have not applied this knowledge to a significant extent as a guide to further improvements, but instead have taken any avenue of improvement that happens to arise from direct selection for yield and economic performance. However with increased population, there is need to increase yield further and breeding require more scientific approaches to handle the problem.