Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
products, which may help monitor the production of GM crops and
when they are traded internationally (Dwivedi et al. 2012 and references
therein).
VIII. BREEDING OPPORTUNITIES
Providing nutritious and safe food to 9 billion people by 2050 is the
greatest challenge to agricultural production in the 21st century. Bio-
forti
cation refers to the development of nutrient-dense staple crops
using conventional breeding and applied genomics, including trans-
genes ( www.harvestplus.org ). There has been signi
cant progress
toward developing nutrient-dense elite germplasm and cultivars of
staple food crops. Farmers in Africa, Asia, and South America are
already growing a few of them (Dwivedi et al. 2012 and references
therein).
In the last decade, the peanut research made considerable progress to
identify and develop germplasm as well as elite breeding lines pos-
sessing desirable traits. A number of germplasm lines with bene
cial
nutritional traits, for example, high or low oil content, improved oil
quality, or germplasm and breeding lines rich in Fe and Zn content, are
available in the public domain (see Section II). Accurate, repeatable,
and cost-effective phenotyping (oil and fatty acid composition,
-
carotene, Fe and Zn, and seed protein allergens) is the key to success
in breeding for nutritional traits. Advances in NIRS assays for estimat-
ing oil and fatty acid composition or for grain Fe and Zn concentrations
(see Section IV) have made it possible to cost-effectively screen large
numbers of breeding samples to discard the segregants in lower range
of the seed quality traits. The inverse relationship between oil and
protein (Dwivedi et al. 1990) facilitates the selection of germplasm and
breeding lines rich in protein or oil content. A high-throughput semi-
quantitative assay (see Section IV) may be used initially to discard
lines with low
β
β
-carotene, and then analyze for
β
-carotene by standard
HPLC in select lines at a later stage.
Abundant peanut genomic resources are currently available in the
public domain. For example,
10,000 simple sequence repeats (SSRs)
(EST or genomic) were identi
ed, of which 1343 (14.5%) were reported
as polymorphic and 593 (6.4%) of these mapped on the peanut genome
(Zhao et al. 2012 and references therein). Furthermore, Pandey et al.
(2012) identi
ed 1351 polymorphic SSRs, and 190 of them showed
greater polymorphic variation (PIC
>
0.50). The patterns of insertion
of miniature inverted-repeat
transposable elements (MITEs),
the
 
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