Integrating marker-assisted selection in crop breeding – prospects and challenges

Mapping and tagging of agriculturally important genes have been greatly facilitated by an array of mole-cular markers in crop plants. Marker-assisted selec-tion (MAS) is gaining considerable importance as it would improve the efficiency of plant breeding through precise transfer of genomic regions of interest (for-ground selection) and accelerating the recovery of the recurrent parent genome (background selection). MAS has been more widely employed for simply inherited traits than for polygenic traits, although there are a few success stories in improving quantitative traits through MAS. The success of MAS depends upon seve-ral critical factors, including the number of target genes to be transferred, the distance between the flanking markers and the target gene, the number o