Reverse breeding: Accelerating innovation in Plant breeding

Abstract

Reverse breeding (RB) is a novel plant breeding technique designed to achieve one of the most sought goal of plant breeding by directly producing parental lines for any heterozygous plant. RB generates perfectly complementing homozygous parental lines through engineered meiosis. The main objective of this review article is to understand the method of producing homozygous parental lines which is based on reducing genetic recombination in the selected heterozygote by eliminating meiotic crossing over. Male or female spores obtained from such plants contain combinations of non-recombinant parental chromosomes which can be cultured in-vitro to generate homozygous doubled haploid plants (DHs). From these DHs, complementary parents are selected and used to reconstitute the heterozygote. The main advantage of this breeding method is that it facilitates the selection of superior hybrid plants. Large population of plants can be generated and screened and superior performing plants can be regenerated indefinitely without prior knowledge of their genetic constitution. The technique will be particularly important for crops lacking large existing collections of breeding lines