Heterosis and Hybrid Crop Breeding: A Multidisciplinary Review.

ABSTRACT: Although hybrid crop varieties are among the most popular agricultural innovations, the rationale for hybrid crop breeding is sometimes misunderstood. Hybrid breeding is slower and more resource-intensive than inbred breeding, but it allows systematic improvement of a population by recurrent selection and exploitation of heterosis simultaneously. Inbred parental lines can identically reproduce both themselves and their F₁ progeny indefinitely, whereas outbred lines cannot, so uniform outbred lines must be bred indirectly through their inbred parents to harness heterosis. Heterosis is an expected consequence of whole-genome non-additive effects at the population level over evolutionary time. Understanding heterosis from the perspective of molecular genetic mechanisms alone may be

SUBMITTER: Labroo MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7943638 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature