Acceleration of genetic improvement of autogamous crops such as wheat and rice is necessary to increase cereal production in response to the global food crisis. Population and pedigree methods of breeding, which are based on inbred line selection, are used commonly in the genetic improvement of autogamous crops. These methods, however, produce a few novel combinations of genes in a breeding pop...

Improving breeding has been widely utilized in crop breeding and contributed to yield and quality improvement, yet few researches have been done to analyze genetic architecture underlying breeding improvement comprehensively. Here, we collected genotype and phenotype data of 99 cultivars from the complete pedigree including Huanghuazhan, an elite, high-quality, conventional indica rice that has...

Many important traits in plant breeding are polygenic and therefore recalcitrant to traditional marker-assisted selection. Genomic selection addresses this complexity by including all markers in the prediction model. A key method for the genomic prediction of breeding values is ridge regression (RR), which is equivalent to best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) when the genetic covariance betwe...

Early recognition of the importance of roots for drought resistance, and the diversity in rice root architecture, provided a strong foundation for drought research at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). IRRI was founded in 1960, and large efforts for research on root growth in response to drought were ongoing by the mid-1970s, with an emphasis on deep root growth, formation of coa...

Analysis of genetic interactions between rice and its pathogenic fungiMagnaporthe oryzae and Rhizoctonia solani should lead to a better understanding of molecular mechanisms of host resistance, and the improvement of strategies to manage rice blast and sheath blight diseases. Currently, dozens of rice resistance (R) genes against specific races of the blast fungus have been described. Among the...

BACKGROUND Higher seed yield is one of the objectives of jatropha breeding. However, genetic analysis of the yield traits has not been done in jatropha. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping was conducted to identify genetic factors controlling growth and seed yield in jatropha, a promising biofuel crop. RESULTS A linkage map was constructed consisting of 105 SSR (simple sequence repeat) mark...

Plant breeding has been very successful in developing improved varieties using conventional tools and methodologies. Nowadays, the availability of genomic tools and resources is leading to a new revolution of plant breeding, as they facilitate the study of the genotype and its relationship with the phenotype, in particular for complex traits. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies are al...

Pulmonary hypertension syndrome (ascites) is a metabolic disorder in fast-growing broilers. Inconsistency of oxygen requirement and the cardiovascular ability make the birds susceptible to ascites. Incidence of ascites was accompanied by right ventricular hypertrophy, fluid accumulation in the abdominal cavity and finally mortality. The objective of the current study was to review the genetic b...

Easy shattering reduces yield from grain loss during rice (Oryza sativa L.) harvest. We characterized a nonshattering japonica rice landrace Jiucaiqing from Taihu Lake valley in China. The breaking tensile strength (BTS; grams force, gf) of the grain pedicel was measured using a digital force gauge to evaluate the degree of shattering at 0, 7, 14, 21, 28, and 35 d after heading (DAH). The BTS o...