Marker Assisted Selection: A Modern Tool to Accelerate Crop Improvement

Producing sufficient food to meet the demand of vastly growing population and eradication of rural poverty is one of the critically important issues that the world is facing.At the current pace, the world population is expected to cross the mark of nine billion people by 2050 adding further pressure to already exhausted food production systems.Considering the increasingly volatile climate, it will be difficult to maintain the crop production in conjugation with the demand, resulting in increased food prices affecting people who already spend the highest percentage of their disposable income on food.In addition to climate change, limited water resource availability and poor soil health have the potential to restrict food crop production (Varshney et al., 2017).In last few years there is a great change in population in rural &urban area.A large population in developing world is shifting from rural to urban area.Within the next decade more than half of the world population, an estimated 3.9 billion will be living in urban area.The metro cities of future are taking shape in developing countries and will affect social& environmental aspect of concern countries and ultimately an alarm for food security.The Urban populations are not able to feed themselves by subsistence food production, and their eating patterns differ from those of rural folk (Singh, 2023).In the event of these challenges, there is a need to look for new ways of breeding for food crops and other plant species by using modern technologies.Marker assisted selection (MAS) is a novel plant breeding technique that uses molecular markers to select the plant carrying genomic regions, which are involved in expression of trait of interest.MAS is used on a broad level for improving the cultivars for various biotic and abiotic stresses.