title: Molecular breeding in Brassica for salt tolerance: importance of microsatellite (SSR) markers for molecular breeding in Brassica.
abstract: Salinity is one of the important abiotic factors for any crop management in irrigated as well as rainfed areas, which leads to poor harvests. This yield reduction in salt affected soils can be overcome by improving salt tolerance in crops or by soil reclamation. Salty soils can be reclaimed by leaching the salt or by cultivation of salt tolerance crops. Salt tolerance is a quantitative trait controlled by several genes. Poor knowledge about mechanism of its inheritance makes slow progress in its introgression into target crops. Brassica is known to be a good reclamation crop. Inter and intra specific variation within Brassica species shows potential of molecular breeding to raise salinity tolerant genotypes. Among the various molecular markers, SSR markers are getting high attention, since they are randomly sparsed, highly variable and show co-dominant inheritance. Furthermore, as sequencing techniques are improving and softwares to find SSR markers are being developed, SSR markers technology is also evolving rapidly. Comparative SSR marker studies targeting Arabidopsis thaliana and Brassica species which lie in the same family will further aid in studying the salt tolerance related QTLs and subsequent identification of the "candidate genes" and finding out the origin of important QTLs. Although, there are a few reports on molecular breeding for improving salt tolerance using molecular markers in Brassica species, usage of SSR markers has a big potential to improve salt tolerance in Brassica crops. In order to obtain best harvests, role of SSR marker driven breeding approaches play important role and it has been discussed in this review especially for the introgression of salt tolerance traits in crops.
authors.affiliation: Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory, Department of Life Science, Sogang University, Seoul South Korea.
authors.forename: Manu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.affiliation: Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory, Department of Life Science, Sogang University, Seoul South Korea.
authors.forename: Ju-Young
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Choi
authors.affiliation: College of Medicine, Seoul National University, Seoul South Korea.
authors.forename: Nisha
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kumari
authors.affiliation: Stress Physiology and Molecular Biology Laboratory, School of Life Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi India.
authors.forename: Ashwani
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pareek
authors.affiliation: Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory, Department of Life Science, Sogang University, Seoul South Korea.
authors.forename: Seong-Ryong
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Kim
keywords: Brassica; QTL; SSR markers; abiotic stress; salt stress