Breeding

Plant improvement has shifted its focus from yield, quality and disease resistance to factors that will enhance commerical export, such as early maturity, shelf life and better processing quality. Conventional plant breeding methods aiming at the improvement of a self-pollinating crop, such as wheat, usually take 10-12 years to develop and release of the new variety. During the past 10 years, significant advances have been made and accelerated methods have been developed for precision breeding and early release of crop varieties.

Plant improvement has shifted its focus from yield, quality and disease resistance to factors that will enhance commerical export, such as early maturity, shelf life and better processing quality. Conventional plant breeding methods aiming at the improvement of a self-pollinating crop, such as wheat, usually take 10-12 years to develop and release of the new variety. During the past 10 years, significant advances have been made and accelerated methods have been developed for precision breeding and early release of crop varieties.

This book provides a detailed overview of applications of post-genome era techniques for livestock genetics and breeding. It also describes techniques for genetically selecting highly productive animals without producing large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, community-based breeding programs for breeding rams and bucks, the response of bovine species to in vitro thermal stress stimulation, and the semen characteristics of wool-breed ram lamb-raised in conditions of high altitude.

This book highlights the current knowledge of the genus Brassica L. in order to understand its biology, diversity, conservation and breeding, as well as to develop disease-resistant and more productive crops. This book will be of interest to many readers, researchers and scientists, who will find this information useful for the advancement of their research towards a better understanding of Brassica breeding programs.

This book fully integrates the conventional and biotechnological approaches to fruit crop breeding. Individual chapters are written on a wide variety of species including apple, apricot, blackberry, blueberry, cranberry, cherry, currant, gooseberry, grape, kiwifruit, peach, pear, plum, raspberry and strawberry.

This book provides analysis of plant breeding and its role for producing high-yielding cultivars that increase farming profitability and sustainability. This work analyzes the past and present of plant breeding, while providing research that investigates the future of crop improvement. Plant breeding today, as it was before, depends on crop biodiversity and its sustainable use, which can be further facilitated by advances in omics and bioinformatics. It starts with assessing plant genetic resources (wild species, landraces, obsolete cultivars, genetic stocks) variation aiming to enhance the cultigen pool. Research on genetics–aided by current omic tools– should lead to designing a knowledge-based plant breeding, which could bring further genetic gains in the breeding pools. Plant breeding, however, will increasingly require pursuing a holistic interdisciplinary approach based on integrated system-oriented thinking.

The book is an excellent reference collection of the research conducted by different workers on induced mutagenesis, worldwide, for more than 80 years. One can get almost all mutation breeding references at one place. The book gives a coherent and concise account of all the important and relevant aspects related to induced mutagenesis with an emphasis on recent developments in the field of crop improvement. The references have been arranged crop wise and important topic wise which deal with not only classical mutation breeding but also spontaneous mutations, somaclonal variations, nanoparticles, and relevant modern aspects.