How can disciplinary research in physiology complement wheat breeding? This introductory chapter is intended to provide broad guidelines to help breeding programs: 1) assess whether physiological criteria should be included in a breeding strategy; 2) evaluate specific physiological selection traits and determine their usefulness in breeding. The other chapters in this book provide more explicit...

The use of reproductive and genetic technologies can increase the efficiency of selective breeding programs for aquaculture species. Four technologies are considered, namely: marker-assisted selection, DNA fingerprinting, in-vitro fertilization, and cryopreservation. Marker-assisted selection can result in greater genetic gain, particularly for traits difficult or expensive to measure, than con...

Doubled haploids are routinely created and phenotypically selected in plant breeding programs to accelerate the breeding cycle. Genomic selection, which makes use of both phenotypes and genotypes, has been shown to further improve genetic gain through prediction of performance before or without phenotypic characterization of novel germplasm. Additional opportunities exist to combine genomic pre...

Cereal crops form the bulk of the world's food sources, and thus their importance cannot be understated. Crop breeding programs increasingly rely on high-resolution molecular genetic markers to accelerate the breeding process. The development of these markers is hampered by the complexity of some of the major cereal crop genomes, as well as the time and cost required. In this review, we address...

Fungal pathogens are the cause of the most common diseases in grapevine and among them powdery mildew represents a major focus for disease management. Different strategies for introgression of resistance in grapevine are currently undertaken in breeding programs. For example, introgression of several resistance genes (R) from different sources for making it more durable and also strengthening t...

Cowpea [Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.] is an important warm-season legume grown primarily in the semi-arid tropics. The majority of cowpea is grown by subsistence farmers in west and central sub-Saharan Africa, where its grain and stover are highly valued for food and forage. Despite its economic and social importance in developing parts of the world, cowpea has received relatively little attent...

Perennial plant breeding is an expensive and time-consuming process, mainly due to the extended growth time for juveniles. In these cases, use of molecular marker-assisted selection (MMAS) allows a characteristic interest at seed or seedling stages. The objective this work was characterize segregation INO locus MMAS early seedless genotypes atemoya 'Gefner' [(G; Annona cherimola Mill. × squamos...

A crucial step in plant breeding is the selection and combination of parents to form new crosses. Genome-based prediction guides the selection of high-performing parental lines in many crop breeding programs which ensures a high mean performance of progeny. To warrant maximum selection progress, a new cross should also provide a large progeny variance. The usefulness concept as measure of the g...