Although cassava is a major food crop, its scientific breeding began only recently compared with other crops. Significant progress has been achieved, particularly in Asia where cassava is used mainly for industrial processes and no major biotic constraints affect its productivity. Cassava breeding faces several limitations that need to be addressed. The heterozygous nature of the crop and parental lines used to generate new segregating progenies makes it difficult to identify parents with good breeding values. Breeding so far has been mainly based on a mass phenotypic recurrent selection. There is very little knowledge on the inheritance of traits of agronomic relevance. Several approaches have been taken to overcome the constraints in the current methodologies for the genetic improvement of cassava. Evaluations at early stages of selection allow for estimates of general combining ability effect or breeding values of parental lines. Inbreeding by sequential self-pollination facilitates the identification of useful recessive traits, either already present in the Manihot gene pool or induced by mutagenesis.

Cassava, a staple food in sub-Saharan Africa, does not provide adequate amounts of pro-vitamin A (VA) carotenoids and has been targeted for biofortification (i.e. selectively breeding cultivars of increased nutrient density with agroeconomically acceptable characteristics). However, the accessibility of pro-VA carotenoids for absorption in different cultivars of cassava remains unknown. Here, we used the coupled in vitro digestion/Caco-2 cell uptake model to screen the relative accessibility of beta-carotene (betaC) in 10 cultivars of cassava with varying concentrations of betaC. After cooking (boiled for 30 min), the betaC concentration in tubers from different cultivars ranged from less than detectable to 6.9 microg betaC/g cassava. Samples were subjected to simulated oral, gastric, and small intestinal digestion to determine stability and micellarization of betaC. All-trans betaC, 9-cis betaC, and 13-cis betaC were the most abundant carotenoids in cooked cassava and recoveries after digestion exceeded 70%. Efficiency of micellarization of total betaC was 30 +/- 2% for various cultivars with no significant difference in isomers and linearly proportional to concentration in cooked cassava (r = 0.87; P < 0.001). Accumulation of all-trans betaC by Caco-2 cells incubated with the diluted micelle fraction for 4 h was proportional (R(2) = 0.99; P < 0.001) to the quantity present in micelles. These results suggest that all-trans betaC content appears to provide the key selection marker for breeding cassava to improve VA status and that the more complicated screening procedure using in vitro digestion coupled to cell uptake does not provide additional information on potential bioavailability.

T he revolution in sequencing technologies has enabled fast and relatively inexpensive genome information (Metzker, 2010 Abbreviations: AMMI, additive main effect and multiplicative interaction; a top10 , mean relatedness of the top10 individuals in the validation set to those in the training set; AYT, advanced yield trial; BLUE, best linear unbiased estimator; BLUP, best linear unbiased predictor; CMD, cassava mosaic disease; CMDI, cassava mosaic disease incidence; CV-CR, cross-validation close relatives; CV-GE, crossvalidation genotype × environment; CV-Random, random crossvalidation; CV-Random_Half, cross-validation scheme in which a randomly chosen half of the observations are used; CV-noCR, cross-validation no close relatives; DM, root dry matter content; GS, genomic selection; G×E, genotype × environment; GBS, genotyping by sequencing; MAS, marker-assisted selection; MCBBI, mean cassava bacterial blight incidence; PYT, preliminary yield trial; RCBD, randomized complete-block design; RKHS, reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces; SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism; top10, 10 most closely related individuals; UYT, uniform yield trial.

Cassava (Manihot esculenta) is an allogamous, vegetatively propagated, Neotropical crop that is also widely grown in tropical Africa and Southeast Asia. To elucidate genetic diversity and differentiation in the crop's primary and secondary centers of diversity, and the forces shaping them, SSR marker variation was assessed at 67 loci in 283 accessions of cassava landraces from Africa (Tanzania and Nigeria) and the Neotropics (Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico and Argentina). Average gene diversity (i.e., genetic diversity) was high in all countries, with an average heterozygosity of 0.5358 +/- 0.1184. Although the highest was found in Brazilian and Colombian accessions, genetic diversity in Neotropical and African materials is comparable. Despite the low level of differentiation [F(st)(theta) = 0.091 +/- 0.005] found among country samples, sufficient genetic distance (1-proportion of shared alleles) existed between individual genotypes to separate African from Neotropical accessions and to reveal a more pronounced substructure in the African landraces. Forces shaping differences in allele frequency at SSR loci and possibly counterbalancing successive founder effects involve probably spontaneous recombination, as assessed by parent-offspring relationships, and farmer-selection for adaptation.

Cassava is a starchy root crop cultivated in the tropics for fresh consumption and commercial processing. Primary selection objectives in cassava breeding include dry matter content and micronutrient density, particularly provitamin A carotenoids. These traits are negatively correlated in the African germplasm. This study aimed at identifying genetic markers associated with these traits and uncovering whether linkage and/or pleiotropy were responsible for observed negative correlation. A genome-wide association mapping using 672 clones genotyped at 72,279 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) loci was performed. Root yellowness was used indirectly to assess variation in carotenoid content. Two major loci for root yellowness were identified on chromosome 1 at positions 24.1 and 30.5 Mbp. A single locus for dry matter content that colocated with the 24.1 Mbp peak for carotenoids was identified. Haplotypes at these loci explained 70 and 37% of the phenotypic variability for root yellowness and dry matter content, respectively. Evidence of megabasescale linkage disequilibrium (LD) around the major loci of the two traits and detection of the major dry matter locus in independent analysis for the white-and yellow-root subpopulations suggests that physical linkage rather that pleiotropy is more likely to be the cause of the negative correlation between the target traits. Moreover, candidate genes for carotenoid (phytoene synthase) and starch biosynthesis (UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase and sucrose synthase) occurred in the vicinity of the identified locus at 24.1 Mbp. These findings elucidate the genetic architecture of carotenoids and dry matter in cassava and provide an opportunity to accelerate breeding of these traits.