Oriental persimmon (Diospyros kaki) originated in Eastern Asia, and many indigenous cultivars have been developed in China, Japan, and Korea. These cultivars are classified into four groups based on their natural astringency loss on the tree and seed formation: pollination-constant non-astringent (PCNA), pollination-variant non-astringent (PVNA), pollination-constant astringent (PCA), and polli...

Apple is a fruit crop of significant economic importance, and breeders world wide continue to develop novel cultivars with improved characteristics. The lengthy juvenile period and the large field space required to grow apple populations have imposed major limitations on breeding. Various molecular biological techniques have been employed to make apple breeding easier. Transgenic technology has...

Breeding of native cool-season grasses has the potential to improve forage production and expand the range of bioenergy feedstocks throughout western North America. Basin wildrye (Leymus cinereus) and creeping wildrye (Leymus triticoides) rank among the tallest and most rhizomatous grasses of this region, respectively. The objectives of this study were to develop interspecific creeping wildrye ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Preservation of cultivar purity creates a particular challenge for plants that are self-incompatible, require insects for cross-pollination, and have easily germinating seeds and vigorously spreading rhizomes. As the fields must be planted with mixed populations, and a balance must be maintained between the cultivars to achieve effective pollination, methods for field monito...

BACKGROUND Genetic engineering offers the opportunity to generate unique genetic variation that is either absent in the sexually compatible gene pool or has very low heritability. The generation of transgenic plants, coupled with breeding, has led to the production of widely used transgenic cultivars in several major cash crops, such as maize, soybean, cotton and canola. The process for regulat...

Insertion-deletion (indel) polymorphisms, such as simple sequence repeats, have been widely used as DNA markers to identify QTLs and genes and to facilitate rice breeding. Recently, next-generation sequencing has produced deep sequences that allow genome-wide detection of indels. These polymorphisms can potentially be used to develop high-accuracy polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based markers. ...

to expand the genetic base of NA breeding. In that regard, China has released 651 cultivars from 1923 to 1995 Chinese and North American (NA) soybean breeding programs (Cui et al., 1999). Through pedigree analysis, Cui et al. have a 70-yr history of genetic progress in relative isolation from each other. Because both programs rest upon a genetic base that is primarily (2000a,b) established that...

Gutierrez et al., 2002; Lu and Myers, 2002). Genetic distances could be as low as 1 to 3%. Research in AustraGenetic diversity in modern upland cotton cultivars (Gossypium lia, China, and Pakistan obtained similar results (Multani hirsutum L.) is thought to be narrow, thus limiting genetic advance. Robust information on the genetic relatedness among currently grown and Lyon, 1995; Zuo et al., 2...