Joint FAO/IAEA Programme of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture

Plant biotechnology applications must not only respond to the challenges of improving food security and fostering socio-economic development, but in doing so, promote the conservation, diversification and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Today the biotechnology toolbox available to plant breeders offers several new possibilities for increasing productivity, crop diversification and production, while developing a more sustainable agriculture. This training course on plant mutant germplasm characterization focuses on one of the most promising set of techniques used in modern crop improvement programmes, i.e. molecular markers. These are rapidly being adopted by plant breeders and molecular biologists as effective and appropriate tools for basic and applied studies addressing biological components in agricultural production systems. Their use in applied breeding programmes can range from facilitating the appropriate choice of parents for crosses, to mapping/tagging of gene blocks associated with economically important traits (often termed “quantitative trait loci”,QTLs). Gene tagging and QTL mapping in turn permit marker-assisted selection (MAS) in backcross, pedigree, and population improvement programmes, thereby facilitating more efficient incremental improvement of specific individual target traits. Additionally the genetic background, as well as markers for the target trait, can be selected for. Through comparative genomics, molecular markers can be used in ways that allow us to y discover and y exploit biodiversity more effectively aid I our understanding of evolutionary relationships between plant species. Substantial progress has been made in recent years in mapping, tagging and isolating many agriculturally important genes using molecular markers, due in large part to improvements in the techniques that have been developed to help find markers for traits of interest. Among the techniques that have proved useful are Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLPs)