Genomic-Assisted Marker Development of Brassica Crop for Agronomic Improvement

Plant scientists face to many new challenges on crop improvement, such as the threat of global climate change, decrease in water and arable land and increase in population. Although traditional plant breeding has produced impressive gains in world food production, it is likely that genomics assisted breeding will be up to the challenges at hand. The integration of genetic maps with associated QTLs, physical maps, and whole-genome sequencing and re-sequencing play an important role on better understanding of plant genomics and accelerate assisted breeding program. We focus on Brassica crops, which constitute one of the world’s most diverse and economically important plant groups. Our work on B. rapa, together with comparative mapping to B. napus and B. juncea tried to identify crucifer building blocks harboring the important QTL/ candidate genes for morphological traits, yield traits, quality traits, and disease resistances in Brassica genome, so as to address some of the reasons behind bottlenecks in conventional Brassica breeding. We used conventional genetic analysis combined with genomic sequencing/resequencing by NGS (next-generation sequencing) technology to find some of the candidate genes, and developed genome wide gene specific SNP (single nucleotide polymorphic) markers for genomics-assisted precision breeding of Brassicas.