Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Mutagenesis—A Potential Approach  
for Crop Improvement
Rajib Roychowdhury and Jagatpati Tah
Abstract Global environmental dissociative changes are now in steady state. Its
negative impacts were gradually imposed on a wide range of crops and thus crop
improvement was hindered as well. Given this challenge, existing and new, appro-
priate technologies need to be integrated for global crop improvement. Among the
different present approaches, mutagenesis and mutation breeding and the isolation
of improved or novel phenotypes in conjunction with conventional breeding pro-
grammes can result in mutant varieties endowed with new and desirable variation of
agrometrical traits. Induced mutations and its related technologies play very well in
this ground and this overall strategy helps to trace the crop genetic diversity along
with its biodiversity maintenance. Such induced mutagenesis, a crucial step in crop
improvement programme, is now successful in application due to the advancement
and incorporation of large-scale selection techniques, micropropagation and other
in vitro culture methods, molecular biology tools and techniques in modern crop
breeding performance. Time to time, different mutation techniques and their appli-
cation processes are changing significantly; in this perspective, insertional muta-
genesis and retrotransposons are taking more supports for mutational tagging and
new mutation generation. For details investigation on plant structure and function,
mutagenic agents and their precise role are much essential as it can produce mutants
with some phenotypic changes. Functional genomics studies make the ultimatum
platform on this field of study where few crop plants were used for mutational
experimentation on some prime agronomic traits till now. This is a prerequisite step
and is applying on diverse crop for further improvement. High throughput DNA
technologies for mutation screening such as TILLING (Targeting Induced Limited
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