Heritability is often used by plant breeders and geneticists as a measure of precision of a trial or a series of trials. Its main use is for computing the response to selection. Most formulas proposed for calculating heritability implicitly assume balanced data and independent genotypic effects. Both of these assumptions are often violated in plant breeding trials. This article proposes a simul...

Plants and herbivores have co-evolved in their natural habitats for about 350 million years, but since the domestication of crops, plant resistance against insects has taken a different turn. With the onset of monoculture-driven modern agriculture, selective pressure on insects to overcome resistances has dramatically increased. Therefore plant breeders have resorted to high-tech tools to conti...

Plant breeders have long recognized the existence of useful genetic variation in the wild ancestors of our domesticated crop species. In cultivated rice (Oryza sativa), crosses between high-yielding elite cultivars and low-yielding wild accessions often give rise to superior offspring, with wild alleles conferring increased performance in the context of the elite cultivar genetic background. Be...

Introduction Fungicides have been widely used on nearly every crop imaginable and are continually being developed and reformulated as more information on their efficacy on specific crops and pathogens is discovered. It is well known that fungicides are developed and used in order to have a direct effect on one or more pathogens, usually to prevent their establishment on a crop. By spraying fung...

Traditionally breeders and geneticists alike have used morphological characteristics or phenotype to distinguish various genotypes/cultivars. However, with the advent of cytoplasmic capture, phenotyping can become difficult, if not impossible. Through this process, lines with new cytoplasms (alloplasmic lines) differ in their cytoplasmic material but have the same nuclear DNA. Since nuclear DNA...

Maize is highly genetically and phenotypically diverse. Tropical maize and teosinte are important genetic resources that harbor unique alleles not found in temperate maize hybrids. To access these resources, breeders must be able to extract favorable unique alleles from tropical maize and teosinte from their population J. B. Holland ( ) · S. Sood Department of Crop Science, North Carolina State...

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...

Crop breeders are currently facing the need to continue increasing crop production feed growing human population, while mitigating negative impacts of climate change on agriculture. Taxonomic and genetic diversity, which includes taxa, genes alleles that offer novel sources resistance pests, disease abiotic factors affect quality quantity, a key tool for address these challenges. Lack access th...

Abstract. Pratama AM, Herawati O, Nabila AN, Belinda TA, Wijayanti AD. 2021. Ethnoveterinary study of medicinal plants used for cattle treatment in Bojonegoro District, East Java, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 22: 4236-4245. is a rural district Indonesia's Java Province where farming and rearing are the main economic activities. The District's producers employ some specifically bovine illnesses. How...