International Journal of Pure & Applied Bioscience (IJPAB)
Year : 2018, Volume : 6, Issue : 1
First page : (1456) Last page : (1465)
Article doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18782/2320-7051.6073

Allele Mining for Crop Improvement

Rima Kumari*, Pankaj Kumar, V. K. Sharma and Harsh Kumar
Department of Agricultural Biotechnology and Molecular Biology, Faculty of Basic Sciences and Humanities
Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University, Pusa (Samastipur)-848125, Bihar
*Corresponding Author E-mail: rimakumari1989@gmail.com
Received: 5.12.2017  |  Revised: 15.01.2018   |  Accepted: 21.01.2018  

 ABSTRACT

Identification and access to allelic variation that affects the plant phenotype is of the utmost importance for the efficient and purposeful utilization of genetic resources in plant variety development. Considering the huge numbers of accessions that are held collectively by gene-banks, genetic resource collections are deemed to harbour a wealth of undisclosed allelic variants. The challenge is how to unlock this variation. Allele mining is a research field aimed at identifying allelic variation of relevant traits within genetic resource collections. It can be defined as an approach that is used to dissect naturally occurring allelic variations or to suitable alleles of a candidate gene controlling key agronomic traits which have potential in crop improvement. It basically helps in tracing the evolution of alleles, identification of new haplotypes and development of allele-specific molecular markers for use in marker-assisted selection (MAS). True allele mining includes the analysis of non-coding and regulatory regions of the candidate gene(s), in addition to analyzing sequence variations in the coding regions of the agronomically important genes so as to cover most of the functional variations of relevance in the genes. Three major approaches such as Eco-tilling, sequencing and association mapping are available for the identification of sequence polymorphism for a given gene in the naturally occurring populations. Allele mining requires various sophisticated bio-informatic tools which are useful for sequence alignment in order to compare the new sequence to reference genome i.e, sequenced genome. Recently, the approaches and applications of allele mining along with the challenges associated have generated a lot of interest among scientists with emphasize on  the need for more refined ‘mining’ strategies for accelerating the process of allele discovery and its utilization in molecular breeding.

Keywords: Allele mining, Tilling & Eco-Tilling, Association mapping, MAS.

Full Text : PDF; Journal doi : http://dx.doi.org/10.18782

Cite this article: Kumari, R., Kumar, P., Sharma, V.K. and Kumar, H., Allele Mining for Crop Improvement, Int. J. Pure App. Biosci.6(1): 1456-1465 (2018). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18782/2320-7051.6073