Biotechnology: An Advanced Tool for Crop Improvement

Abstract

Plant breeding is mainly concerned with genetic improvement of crops through hybridization, screening and selection of advance lines. The conventional methods give advance varieties with desirable traits but take consume more time (6 to 12 years) to achieve. Biotechnology tools makes breeding methods more advance by reducing the time to get improved varieties. Other than conventional methods varietal advancement can be achieved by applying plant tissue culture, transgenic approaches and molecular breeding methods. Crop improvement by using biotechnology approaches is mostly concerned with protoplast fusion to get somatic hybrids, gene transfer to get genetically modified organisms and use of DNA markers to select trait of interests. Variety with improved biotic and abiotic stress resistance can be developed in less time and more accuracy using recent biotechnological approaches. Several advance tools are being utilized for that purpose including, nanotechnology, bioinformatics tools offers new era of genomics assisted molecular breeding. Next Generation Sequencing and high throughput genotyping approaches are increasing efficiency and output of biotechnological tools in agriculture. Current review focused on overview of biotechnological tools being applied for crop improvement.