Allele Mining – Approaches and Utility

The development of new varieties in crop plants was mainly due to the presence of beneficial alleles in plant genetic resources. This untapped potential natural genetic variation exist mainly in the form of wild relatives and land races, which can be utilized for development of superior genotypes. Hence, there is a need to revisit the plant genetic resources for new and superior alleles to increase the potential of crops for economically important traits. Based on gene and genome sequences, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) strategies are devised to isolate useful alleles of genes from a wide range of species. By way of discovering the full diversity of available alleles, the gene banks can be utilized to its fullest extent and enable us to use the best alleles of agronomic significance. There are more number of germplasms that are conserved in gene banks, which are thought to contain more amount of variation and diverse alleles of agronomic importance. The challenge is how to unlock this variation. Allele mining is aimed at identifying allelic variation of relevant traits within genetic resources collections. The developments made in the field of data mining, cost effective genotyping and NGS platforms will enable us to use sequence based approach to find novel alleles.