The huge variety of animal and other species that we see today, together with those now extinct, evolved by the process of natural selection. The key to natural selection, and to the artificial selection practised by breeders, is the inherited variation in many characteristics that exists between...

This chapter discusses the theoretical considerations in marker-assisted selection (MAS). It covers the components of MAS, marker-assisted gene introgression, marker-assisted gene pyramiding, selection for quantitative traits and long-term selection.

This chapter describes the different steps of genetic transformation (regeneration, transformation and selection) and discusses the potential use of this technology in grain legume improvement.

This chapter provides an overview of key decision support tools that need to support molecular breeding programmes, including germplasm evaluation, breeding population management, genotype-by-environment interaction (GEI), genetic map construction, marker-trait linkage and association analysis,...

This chapter introduces some basic concepts that are required for understanding fundamentally important issues described in subsequent chapters. The concepts include crop domestication, critical events in the history of plant breeding, basics of quantitative genetics (variance, heritability and...

This chapter discusses the practice of marker-assisted selection (MAS). It chapter is divided into the following sections: selection schemes for MAS; bottlenecks in the application of MAS; reducing costs and enhancing scale and efficiency; traits most suitable for MAS; marker-assisted gene...

This chapter covers the following aspects of mango breeding and genetics: origin, distribution and cultivation of cultivars; reproductive mechanisms (polyembryony, floral biology and pollination incompatibility, and cytology); inheritance of characters (dwarfness, regular bearing and precocity,...

This chapter discusses the current state of mango cell culture, gene cloning, and manipulation of cell cultures to address plant breeding objectives by genetic engineering. Specific topics that are covered consisted of: cell and tissue culture (organogenesis, somatic embryogenesis, and protoplast...

This chapter describes progress in the development of cultivars resistant to root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp.) through mass selection, recurrent selection, marker-assisted selection and genetic engineering approaches.

This chapter discusses how genetics influence animal behaviour and the three animal breeding techniques used to study behaviour genetics (breeding to identify major gene effects, hybridization experiments and artificial selection experiments). The roles of heritability, mode of inheritance,...