Abstract:

Breeding and extension of new cultivars with good qualities, multiple resistances, stress tolerances, and high yielding are essential to fulfill the food safety in China. However, most crop breeding activities are still based on visual and phenotypic selection, where the breeder’s experience plays a major role, and the breeding efficiency is extremely low. On the other hand, a large amount of biological data keeps accumulating dramatically as the rapid development in biotechnology and genomics. But the breeders have no ideas how to integrate this information in their traditional breeding programs due to the lack of appropriate tools and methods. Molecular design breeding first studies the dynamitic behaviors from multiple levels among all components consisting of a plant, and their interactions with environments during development. And then a blueprint of specific cultivars meeting particular breeding objectives is designed, and the optimum strategy to reach the blueprint is provided. Therefore, by understanding the genetic basis of all agronomically important traits and the allelic variation at those loci, the breeders would be able to design superior genotypes at their requirements ‘in silico’. By design breeding, the crossing and selection process can be simulated and optimized before going to the field, and thus the breeding efficiency can be greatly enhanced by shifting the tradition experience breeding to the precision breeding.

Key words: Molecular design breeding, Perspectives