Marker assisted selection in plant breeding: Current status, challenges and future opportunities

Conventional plant breeding along with biotechnological approaches has made a remarkable successin accelerating crop improvement programme worldwide during last few decades. Plant breeders hasbeen facing newer challenges of trait specific breeding, speeding up of selection process, increasedsusceptibility of pests and diseases, need for resistance towards abiotic stresses particularly climaticadversities etc. Acceleration of the selection process is a must for plant breeding to cope up with thenewer challenges. In accelerated breeding, molecular marker technology has been proved to be the mostpromising one. In this paper, an attempt has been made to give a comprehensive account of molecularmarkers, marker assisted selection and their current status of application, the challenges and future scopes.