Plant Breeding Principles Applied to Corn Improvement

Principles and Utilization of Combining Ability in Plant Breeding

In any hybridization program, recognition of the best combination of two (or more) parental genotypes to maximize variance within related breeding populations, and as a result the chance of recognizing superior transgressive segregants in the segregating populations, are the most critical challenge to plant breeders. Since the combining ability was introduced in 1942, it has been widely adopted...

Plant breeding: Induced mutation technology for crop improvement

present forms of life are the product of three factors: • mutation, the fundamental source of heritable variation, • environmental factors, which influence the selection of those mutations that survive and reproduce, and • time, during which the genotype and environment constantly interact and evolutionary change is realized. Genetic variation found in nature does not represent the original spe...

Current developments in breeding, genetics, genomics, and molecular biology applied to sweetpotato improvement

Sweetpotato is the seventh most important food crop in the world after maize, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, and barley. Although it originated in Central to South America, Asia is now the largest producing region with three quarters of the world’s annual production. Sweetpotato can withstand poor growing conditions, such as low soil nutrients and periodic drought, and can accumulate starches ...

Corn grain yield responses to tillage systems and plant densities

QTL tools applied to forest breeding

Background In last decades, the progress of molecular techniques, bioinformatics tools and genome analysis equipment allowed genomes to be sequenced and analyzed for several plants. For Eucalyptus, the combination of quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping with genomic analyses, has allowed the identification and validation of a few genomic regions involved in growth and wood quality characters. ...