The improvement, and the preservation against stress, of quality traits in food and industrial crops are among the most important goals in plant breeding, and are gaining more and more attention. Improved crop quality is of great economical and social value for both developed and developing countries, and has the capacity to bring about greatly enhanced quality of life. Major constraints to improving quality in agricultural crops include a lack of understanding of the genetic basis of quality traits and limited diverse and desirable germplasm, and the difficulty in efficiently combining favourable alleles into an optimal genotype. This CRP will address the technological and methodological issues associated with "quality gene pyramiding" - using molecular markers to identify and breed multiple desired quality genes into one variety of seed crops.
The overall objectives of this CRP will focus on the development and transfer between participants of methodologies and technologies for the identification and tagging of mutated genes contributing to important crop quality characters, and their pyramiding to develop improved breeding material using molecular marker assisted selection.
1. Development and establishment of efficient methodologies for the induction of mutants and screening of crop germplasm with diverse and desirable quality characters including nutritional characters and tolerance to stresses affecting quality in crop plants.
2. Development of molecular markers for tagging genes for quality characters and enhanced tolerance to stresses in induced mutants or other germplasm.
3. Use of molecular markers to pyramid loci determining desired quality characters and enhanced tolerance to stresses with the aim of developing improved crop varieties.
4. Genetic dissection of quality and stress resistance characters using molecular markers to establish the number and the linkage relationships of genes responsible for such traits.
5. Transfer of knowledge and technologies between participants to accelerate breeding programs for the improvement of quality, nutritional, and stress tolerance traits in crops.
6. Develop improved germplasm with enhanced quality traits.
1. Crop germplasm enriched by the generation of more than 20 novel mutant lines and 100 advanced breeding lines.
2. Nine new varieties including rice (4), groundnut (3) and cotton (2) have been released for large-scale production.
3. Thousands of molecular markers have been developed for basic and applied research.
4. Important quality and stress tolerance traits have been tagged by molecular markers in rice, barley, okra, groundnut, wheat, cotton
and potato.
5. New methods and techniques developed for screening of crop quality and stress tolerance mutants.
6. Increase in the production of quality foods and farmers’ food supply and income (e.g. Vietnam)
7. Enhanced bilateral and multi-lateral collaboration among the participating institutes ( China –Japan; China-Australia) and
access to international expertise and facilities;
8. Enhanced research and educational capacity on molecular marker technologies in the participating institutes (Thailand, India, )
9. Enhanced public awareness about the importance and potential of plant mutagenesis for meeting challenge of climate change and
global warming (TV programme in Australia)
1) To generate genetic variability for quality traits and resistance to quality-affecting stresses through use of induced mutations for germplasm enhancement in crop plants;
2) To characterize loci at the genetic and molecular level and utilize the information for more efficient crop improvement through the combined use of quality trait mutants and existing germplasm collections with application of molecular resources (markers, linkage maps, etc) through marker assisted selection;
3) To foster implementation of marker assisted selection for gene pyramiding in plant breeding programmes;
4) To deliver germplasm with enhanced quality and stress resistance attributes for the benefit of crop breeding programmes in developing countries;
5) To foster relationships, transfer knowledge, technology, and genetic and molecular resources between all participating research groups for their mutual benefit;
6) To produce guidelines and publish methods on the application of marker assisted selection for gene pyramiding in plant breeding.
7) Produce and communicate research results that enhance the quality and relevance of mutation breeding.