Tag: Plant Breeding

Plant breeders have long relied on genetic markers to predict how crops will perform, but many important traits such as yield, flowering time, and stress responses are shaped by complex interactions between genes and the environment. In this study, Creach et al. investigated whether combining multiple…

Despite the usefulness of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for linking DNA variation to agronomic traits, GWAS are focused on detecting common alleles and often fail to detect less-common, rare variants. Rare variants may account for a significant portion of the heritability behind complex traits…

For crop breeders, the deceptively simple question “is it better?” hides a web of consequences when extra chromosome sets are added (polyploidy), and this perspective pulls those pieces together. What, exactly, do additional gene copies and larger cells buy in terms of yield, quality, and resilience?…

Oat (Avena sativa) is a globally cultivated cereal for its rich dietary fiber and health-promoting benefits. Yet, despite its nutritional importance, oat genomics has long lagged behind other cereals due to its large, repeat-rich, and allohexaploid genome which does not generally recombine. In a recent…

This is an interesting and engaging review article, written by a team from Bayer US Crop Science, on how mutations (broadly defined) have benefited plant domestication and breeding. While it briefly covers the basics, such as population genetics, it really focuses on demystifying and normalizing the…

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first genome sequence of a plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, (see https://doi.org/10.1038/35048692). As this review by Bevan et al. observes, this exciting accomplishment was met with some skepticism by those who felt that it was not likely to…

Most food crops are relatively intolerant to soil salinity, yet globally soils are becoming increasingly salinized. This excellent review by Raza et al. pulls together the myriad approaches that are being used to develop salinity-smart crops. It starts with an overview of how soil salinity affects crops…

Hybrid crops are key to modern agriculture, offering higher yields, improved stress resilience, and greater uniformity through heterosis (“hybrid vigor”), where offspring from two different inbred lines outperform their parents. However, producing homozygous inbred lines for stable hybrid seed production…