Plant improvement has shifted its focus from yield, quality and disease resistance to factors that will enhance commercial export, such as early maturity, shelf life and better processing quality. Conventional plant breeding methods aiming at the improvement of a self-pollinating crop usually take 10-12 years to develop and release of the new variety. During the past 10 years, significant advances have been made and accelerated methods have been developed for precision breeding and early release of crop varieties.
This book focuses on the accelerated breeding technologies that have been adopted for major oil crops. It summarizes concepts dealing with germplasm enhancement and development of improved varieties based on innovative methodologies that include doubled haploidy, marker assisted selection, marker assisted background selection, genetic mapping, genomic selection, high-throughput genotyping, high-throughput phenotyping, mutation breeding, reverse breeding, transgenic breeding, shuttle breeding, speed breeding, low cost high-throughput field phenotyping, etc. This edited volume is therefore an excellent reference on accelerated development of improved crop varieties.
Dr. Satbir Singh Gosal is a former Director at the School of Agricultural Biotechnology, and former Director of Research at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, India. He was an Honorary Member of the Board of Assessors (Australian Research Council, Canberra), Biotechnology Career Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, USA, and President of the Punjab Academy of Sciences. He has published more than 200 research papers in refereed journals and 35 book chapters. He has co-authored one textbook and co-edited 6 Books with Springer.
Dr. Shabir Hussain Wani Assistant Professor (Senior Scale) cum Scientist, Genetics and Plant Breeding at Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops, Khudwani, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Srinagar J&K, India. He received Ph.D. degree in plant breeding and genetics on transgenic rice for abiotic stress tolerance from the Punjab Agricultural University Ludhiana, India. He then joined the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (Farm Science Centre) as program coordinator (i/c) at Senapati, Manipur, India. He teaches courses related to plant breeding, seed science and technology, and stress breeding and has published more than 200 papers/chapters in journals and books of international and national repute. He served as guest editor and reviews editor for journal Frontier in Plant Science (2015-2018). He has also edited 20 books on current topics in crop improvement for abiotic stress tolerance published by Springer Nature. His Ph.D. research fetched first prize in the North Zone Competition, at national level, in India during 2009. He also served as visiting Scientist at Department of Plant Soil and Microbial Sciences, Michigan State University, USA under the UGC Raman Post Doctoral Fellowship programme during 2016-2017. He was elected as Fellow of Linnean Society of London 2017. Currently, he is in charge of Wheat improvement programme at MRCFC Khudwani SKAUST Kashmir under the ICAR-All India Coordinated Improvement Project on Wheat and Barley.
