Marker-assisted breeding strategies for brinjal improvement: A review

Abstract:

Biotic and abiotic stresses like Fusarium wilt, shoot and fruit borer, drought, salinity and heat stress make it hard to develop better brinjal varieties. These stresses affect fruit yield and quality. Plant breeding helps improve crops by choosing genes. It takes a long time and is affected by the environment. This makes it hard to improve crops with traits. Marker-assisted breeding is a way to enable breeders to rapidly select. Also, introgress target genes or quantitative trait loci (QTLs) linked to desirable agronomic traits. Advances in marker technologies, such as simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), along with QTL mapping, genomics-assisted breeding, genome-wide association studies, and next-generation sequencing, increase breeding accuracy in brinjal. The review also discusses disease resistance, insect resistance and fruit quality. The review also discusses disease resistance, insect resistance and fruit quality. It talks about how to make brinjal strong against stress. There are challenges. Markers need to be checked. Some traits are hard to understand. There are not enough genomic resources. Future brinjal improvement programs will likely integrate marker-assisted breeding, genomic selection, CRISPR/Cas genome editing, phenomics, and artificial intelligence-based breeding.