Plant breeding has evolved plenty since the days Gregor Mendel walked the Earth 200 years ago. We’ve had developments ranging from mutagenesis to GMOs to gene editing… and now, breeding has taken a step forward as technology develops in the realm of genetic molecular markers.
“People were looking into ways to get a glimpse at the source of the genome — that’s the DNA,” says Beni Kaufman, director of business development with Agriplex Genomics, during a Seed World Giant Views interview at the American Seed Trade Association’s CSS & Seed Expo. “There was no way to do the whole genome sequencing — the cost was prohibitive, and the technology was too slow. So, people came up with an alternative, which is a way to sample the genome.”
Since the development of the molecular marker technology, the sampling methods have rapidly expanded. Even as technology became faster and cheaper to sequence the whole genome, Kaufman says researchers learned one thing.
“What’s interesting is once we could sequence the whole genome, people realized that we don’t need all the secrets — most of it isn’t really useful,” he says. “Even now, when you can do sequencing in a very efficient and economical way, you’re still using those SNPs, because they’re the major source of DNA variation. SNPs are probably the ultimate molecular marker method.”
But, all this technology leads to one ultimate goal: molecular breeding, or using that genetic information to make a selection decision or advanced decisions in breeding programs.
Make sure to listen to the entire Giant Views with Kaufman above.
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