Novel Approaches and Advanced Molecular Techniques for Crop Improvement

Abstract

With the increasing volume of the world population, there is a relatively increased demand for food production. Conventional breeding methods no more remain viable to overcome the increase in food demand. The field of biotechnology and molecular biology has opened up new horizons of science by revolutionizing the agriculture and farming methods. It has greatly facilitated our understanding of the molecular processes underlying the stress tolerance mechanism of plants, by providing new breakthroughs. Advancements in the fields of genomics, stress biology, and bioinformatics can help in the development of stress-tolerant crops. Simultaneously, advanced molecular biology techniques have provided us with the most attractive tools for typical laboratory approaches. In this chapter, we discuss the advanced molecular approaches and novel biotechnological tools for sustainable crop improvement. A number of techniques including plant tissue culture, mutagenesis, and transformation have been presented. Advanced functional genomics studies give a better understanding of the plant genome and its modification. RNA interference, CRISPR/Cas, next-generation sequencing, and nanotechnology have become new promising techniques for improving crops according to future need. These are viable options to obtain improved genotypes that can survive under changing climate. In this chapter, we also focus on the applications of molecular biology for crop improvement, such as allele mining, gene pyramiding, linkage and association mapping, genetic engineering (GE), molecular breeding (MB), marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC), marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS), genome-wide selection (GWS), and next-generation sequencing (NGS). Lastly, we also highlight a field case study considered as one of the few examples of trait improvement in plants.

Topics & Concepts