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Polyploidy in Crop Improvement and Evolution

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Plant Biology and Biotechnology

Abstract

Breeding of polyploid crops has been in progress since the domestication of crop plants, while genetic gains can be obtained through selection, evaluation and recombination, the successful selection of crop improvement may depend on understanding and unravelling the complexities of genetic variation that underlies the phenotype. The genomic sequence analysis has vastly enhanced our knowledge of plant genomes, leading to an understanding of the behaviour of polyploid plant genomes. A better understanding of polyploidy holds a great promise for crop improvement by better association between genotype and phenotype and bridging gaps for the genetic transmission of desired agronomic traits between crop species and their wild relatives.

For a long period of time, polyploidy in plants has been considered to be an important phenomenon because of genome buffering, increased allelic diversity, fixing heterozygosity and the opportunity for novel phenotypic variations because of duplicated genes which acquire new function (Stebbins, Variation and evolution in plants. Columbia University Press, Columbia, 1950). Polyploidisation followed by fractionation and duplicate gene diversification provides the opportunity to reconsider the importance of polyploidy for crop improvement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, C.S. Azad University of Agriculture & Technology, Kanpur, 208 001, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Dinesh Narayan Bharadwaj

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  1. Dinesh Narayan Bharadwaj
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Correspondence to Dinesh Narayan Bharadwaj .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sri Biotech Laboratories India Limited, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Bir Bahadur

  2. Department of Genetics, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Manchikatla Venkat Rajam

  3. Division of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR), Bangalore, Karnataka, India

    Leela Sahijram

  4. Center for Pharmaceutics, Pharmacognosy and Pharmacology, School of Life Sciences, Institute of Trans-Disciplinary Health Science and Technology (IHST), Bangalore, Karnataka, India

    K.V. Krishnamurthy

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Bharadwaj, D.N. (2015). Polyploidy in Crop Improvement and Evolution. In: Bahadur, B., Venkat Rajam, M., Sahijram, L., Krishnamurthy, K. (eds) Plant Biology and Biotechnology. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2286-6_24

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