Q&A on rice research: Part 3 of 7 -- How do molecular tools aid crop breeding?
Channel: GCProgramme
Date: 19/12/2013

MOLECULAR BREEDING SAVES TIME AND MONEY: Marie-Noëlle poses a cogent question: "Without knowing what you have in your germplasm, how can you tap into the germplasm?" Molecular breeding helps to rapidly and accurately unlock the potential in parental lines, cutting the breeding time by more than half, compared to conventional rice breeding. Marie-Noëlle also talks of the benefits of OptiMAS, a tool offered by GCP's Integrated Breeding Platform to help breeders in making the right decision for crosses. She explains the benefits of marker-assisted selection (MAS) and marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) by speeding up crop breeding, and helping select correct parents. "Marker information can give you the information that the phenotyping will give you, but in a later generation." The time difference is four years compared to 10, saving both time and money. Even better, during that four-year marker-assisted breeding cycle, there are intermediate and direct benefits for farmers: "During that four-year cycle, you can give the farmer a progeny that is close to his preferred variety, in which you just introduce the gene of interest," says Marie-Noëlle. Read on our rice research: http://bit.ly/169CdBZ