Approaches in cereal breeding

Abstract

The main goal of plant breeding is to improve quality traits, yield and resistance to abiotic and biotic stress factors. A thousand years ago, people selected the best plants, seeds or fruits to produce seed for new crops and food for human and animal nutrition. Modern plant breeding is based on genetic principles and contributes to increases in yield and quality components (contents of protein, amino acids, fat, sucrose, mineral elements etc.). Breeders in conventional breeding programs in the last six decades have made changes to plant phenotypes, significantly improved resistance to diseases, earliness, and frost and drought resistance, and improved scientific farming practices, baking and milling technologies, and beverage production technology. Through bioinformatics and improved technology, breeders have developed ways to improve and accelerate the breeding process to combine desired traits in new genotypes as well to operate at the level of individual cells and their chromosomes. Nowadays, modern biotechnology is used to improve human nutrition, and develop genotypes with significantly higher yields and quality compared with genotypes created by conventional breeding. By genetic modification it is possible to add, modify or delete a trait without interfering between two complete genomes. However, genetically modified crops can be used after their assessment in terms of human health, food safety and the environment.

Resilience in maize production for food security: Evaluating the role of climate-related abiotic stress in Pakistan

“…As global average temperatures have steadily climbed, they have set off a chain reaction of extreme weather that has wreaked havoc on farming and the food supply [ 35 ]. This research estimates the effect of temperature, Precipitation, and sunshine hours on maize output using the Transcendental Logarithmic Production model, using panel data from the National Rural Fixed Observation Point in China from 2009 to 2018, about 3150 small farmers engaged in maize planting [ 36 ].…”

Assessing the Potential of Old and Modern Serbian Wheat Genotypes: Yield Components and Nutritional Profiles in a Comprehensive Study

“…Grain yield is a complex quantitative trait influenced by multiple factors and their interactions. Also, it is the result of various yield components that interact in a multiplicative manner, leading to the final grain yield [4,17,18,49,50]. In this study, the influence of genotype, year, and their interaction on the variation of the number of grains per spike, grain weight per spike, thousand grain weight, and grain yield per plant was analyzed (Figure 2).…”

“…The number and size of developing grains on the wheat spike can affect the overall sink strength, and wheat genotypes with a greater number of grains or larger grains generally have a higher sink strength, allowing them to attract and utilize more assimilates [14,15]. Therefore, studying yield components related to grain number and size could help to better understand the genetic basis for increasing wheat production [4,8,13,[16][17][18][19].…”

Development of selection criteria for improving grain yield in wheat grown in different agro-ecological environments

“…However, the creation of genotypes with increased tolerance to abiotic stress is a slow process that depends on the available genetic variability (Crouch et al, 2009;Petrović et al, 2020;Marković et al, 2021). Thus, effective selection requires knowledge of genetic systems that control inheritance of traits, the nature and extent of population variation, the relationship between traits and grain yield, as well as the effect of the environment on the phenotypic expression of traits (Yagdi and Sozen, 2009;Madić et al, 2009;Knežević et al, 2020;Roljević Nikolić et al, 2021). Grain yield is formed during the ontogenetic development of the plant in interaction with environmental factors and it is the resultant value of the various traits − yield components.…”