Advance breeding and biotechnological approaches for crop improvement: A review

Abstract

In this changing climate scenario, rapid increase of human population resulted in increased demand of food production. During the last century crop plants have been improved through classical breeding techniques and numerous varieties of several crops have been developed across the world. However conventional breeding in improving crop plants is constrained due to genetic erosion, genetic drag, reproductive obstacles and usually take longer time. Thus, there is an urgent need for the novel breeding and biotechnology-assisted crop improvement, which ultimately aimed to obtain novel plant traits. Many novel techniques such as marker assisted selection, marker assisted back cross breeding, marker assisted gene pyramiding plays crucial role in improvement of crop plants. Advancement in plant genetic engineering (genetic transformation and genome editing) have made it possible to transfer gene into crop plants from unrelated plants and even from non-plant organism. These biotechnological approaches are a great option to improve crop plants with significant commercial properties such as increased biotic stress resistant or abiotic stress tolerances; nutrition; yield and quality.