Carotenoid accumulation and agronomic performance of maize hybrids involving parental combinations from different marker-based groups

Progress update: Crop development of biofortified staple food crops under HarvestPlus

“…Initial screening of more than 1,500 maize germplasm accessions found ranges of 0-19 ppm provitamin A in existing maize varieties, exceeding the provitamin A target of 15 ppm [45,46,47]. These nutrients were consistently expressed in the maize inbred lines across different growing conditions, and further assessment indicated potential to increase the levels of multiple carotenoids simultaneously [48,49,50,51]. The identification of loci associated with provitamin A carotenoids and the development of DNA markers have led to accelerated genetic gain in breeding for increased provitamin A content.…”

Accruing genetic gain in pro-vitamin A enrichment from harnessing diverse maize germplasm

“…Carotenoid composition and content in maize are regulated by a complex genetic system and are largely controlled by additive gene effects with strong genotypic component in their inheritance (Egesel et al 2003;Islam et al 2004;Wong et al 2004;Senete et al 2011;Kandianis et al 2013;Owens et al 2014;Suwarno et al 2015). These critical genetic properties coupled with the capacity of genotypes to accumulate relatively stable amounts of individual carotenoids across diverse growing conditions (Brunson and Quackenbush 1962;Quackenbush et al 1966;Kurilich and Juvik 1999;Egesel et al 2003;Menkir et al 2008;Menkir et al 2014;Suwarno et al 2015) as well as the positive correlations among individual carotenoids (Kurilich and Juvik 1999;Menkir et al 2008;Owens et al 2014) and between grain yield and provitamin A content (Suwarno et al 2015;Menkir et al 2014) demonstrate that simultaneous increases in accumulation of provitamin-A and other carotenoids may be successfully made without compromising yield potential and other desirable agronomic and adaptive traits (Pfeiffer and McClafferty 2007;Bouis and Welch 2010;Menkir et al 2014).…”

“…These hybrids accumulated significantly higher levels of pro-vitamin A and produced comparable or significantly higher grain yields than an orange endosperm commercial maize hybrid marketed in Nigeria. Other studies also showed that selection of provitamin A enriched maize inbred lines as parents was effective in generating high yielding hybrids with enhanced provitamin A content (Egesel et al 2003;Senete et al 2011;Pixley et al 2013;Menkir et al 2014;Muthusamy et al 2014;Suwarno et al 2015). These results demonstrate that the advances made in the development of provitamin A enriched maize inbred lines can be encapsulated not only in hybrids but also in synthetic varieties to increase the delivery of nutritious maize to farming communities through the informal seed system, which supplies considerable quantity of seeds in rural areas with limited market access (DeVries and Toenniessen 2001).…”

Fatty acid composition and proximate analysis of improved high‐oil corn double haploid hybrids adapted to subtropical areas

“…Yellow and white corn types are important raw materials for the food, feed, and biorefinery industries, which manufacture starch, oil, breakfast cereals, snacks, beer, sweeteners, animal feeds, and fuel ethanol (Serna‐Saldívar, ). Therefore, global maize breeding programs have refocused their attention on developing new genotypes possessing desired nutritional properties (Ortiz‐Monasterio et al., ), processing quality (Serna‐Saldívar, Gómez, & Rooney, ), nutraceutical attributes (Menkira, Gedila, Tanumihardjob, Adepojua, & Bossey, ), oil content (Velasco & Fernández‐Martínez, ), and fatty acid (FA) composition (Val, Schwartz, Kerns, & Deikman, ).…”