The increasing demands for high-yielding, multiple stress tolerant and nutritionally enriched maize varieties warrants accelerated breeding that makes use of modern tools and technologies, including doubled haploids, molecular markers, high-throughput and reliable phenotyping, off-season nurseries, and decision support tools. Molecular markers are used in the context of marker assisted back crossing, marker assisted recurrent selection, forward breeding and more recently, in genome-wide selection. The climate change scenario has been challenging the breeders to develop products resilient under multiple stresses in short time span. Reduction in resources is another challenge breeding programs have to manage, without compromising the selection efficiency. By integrating genomic tools like forward breeding and genomic selection, along with enabling technologies breeding programs will be able to increase genetic gains with similar or reduced level of resources.
To support discussions on the topic of genomics assisted maize breeding, CIMMYT will be conducting an international webinar with its partners on ‘‘Genomic-assisted maize breeding: Status and Opportunities’’
12th August 2020: 4:00 pm Nairobi time/3:00 pm Harare time/8:00 am Mexico time/6:30 pm India time.
Guests include EiB's Michael Olsen, Upstream Research Coordinator GMP, CIMMYT; and Kelly Robbins, Quantitative Geneticist, Cornell University
More info: https://www.cimmyt.org/events/genomic-assisted-maize-breeding-status-and...