Brassicas

Abstract

Oleiferous brassicas are interesting breeding material since they have a complete range of breeding systems ranging from complete range of cross-pollination to self-pollination. Besides improvement in production and productivity of various economically important brassicas, improvement in the nutritional profile of their oil and defatted meal, and development of traits like herbicide tolerance, male sterility, disease and insect-pest resistance, and development of hybrid cultivars remain the prime objectives for their genetic improvement. To achieve these goals, conventional breeding efforts in conjunction with modern biotechnological tools such as molecular marker-assisted selection, doubled haploidy breeding, in vitro mutagenesis, and transgenic technology offer a great promise. The doubled haploidy (DH) technology in combination with other biotechnological and conventional breeding tools has resulted in improvements in many yield and quality attributes in Brassicaceae. Interspecific and even intergeneric hybridizations have greatly helped in generating additional variability through the recovery of distant hybrids. Further, in vitro technologies such as microspore culture, and embryo and ovary rescue coupled with in vitro mutagenesis can also generate additional selection avenues by creating variability through gemetoclonal and somaclonal variation. This review focuses on breeding methods, which individually or in combination could be deployed for solving the pressing problems of male sterility and fertility restoration mechanisms for hybrid seed production in crop brassicas, their crossability improvement and generation of variability and quality improvement.