Futuristic trends in rice breeding

History of rice breeding is very old and runs back to 60 years. Initial efforts were to purify land varieties followed by hybridization and selection. Later green revolution progressed and then followed the era of hybrids. Chinese developed many hybrids with outstanding yield performance. New endeavours following this are molecular breeding, and transgenic. Molecular techniques are another promising technique implemented in rice breeding. The time that had been spent earlier for the selection of progenies and parents with desired gene(s) got reduced a lot with the identification of gene tagged markers. Use of markers for the identification of genotype is termed as marker assisted breeding. To get a faster and accurate desired development, transgenic came in to picture.


Author : Henry Nickolas and SDarshan*