ARS | Publication request: A NEW PARADIGM FOR THE BREEDING OF LONGER GENERATION HYBRID CROPS

Submitted to: American Society for Horticultural Science
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: August 16, 2002
Publication Date: October 16, 2004
Citation: Havey, M.J. 2004. A new paradigm for the breeding of longer generation hybrid crops . American Society for Horticultural Science.

Technical Abstract: Many agriculturally important crops possess longer generation times, including the biennial vegetables, woody ornamentals, and tree crops for the production of fruits, nuts, and wood products. The genetic improvement of these longer-generation crops is a slow process requiring long-term commitments of time and resources. In this presentation, I describe a breeding scheme using previously described and yet to be realized technologies to reduce the time required to breed competitive hybrids of longer-generation crops. The approach is based on recurrent selection to increase the frequency of favorable alleles in populations, the extraction of haploids and their doubling to produce uniform, homozygous inbreds, the testing of these inbreds to identify superior parents for hybrid production, transformation to introduce simply inherited disease resistances or other value-added traits, and finally transformation of the mitochondrial genome to produce cytoplasmic male-sterile (CMS) lines for efficient hybrid-seed production. I review salient literature regarding each step of this breeding approach and describe challenges to the implementation of this new paradigm.