Marker Assisted Selection in Comparison to Conventional Plant Breeding: Review Article

Abstract

Although significant strides have been made in crop improvement through phenotypic selections for agronomical important traits, considerable difficulties are often encountered during this process. A new variety in conventional breeding could take 8 to 10 years to develop. Breeders are very interested in new technologies to speed up this process or make it more efficient. The development of molecular markers was therefore greeted with great enthusiasm as it was seen as a major breakthrough promising to overcome this key limitation. Marker assisted selection is likely to become more valuable as a larger number of genes are identified and their functions and interactions elucidated; Reduced costs and optimized strategies for integrating MAS with phenotypic selection are needed before the technology can reach its full potential. Overall, marker assisted selection has proven to be a very useful technique in plant breeding. Through these techniques, plant breeders have been able to produce cultivars of agriculturally significant plants with genes for resistance to many diseases that were not possible before the advent of DNA technology