Vol. 11, Special Issue 11 (2022)

Author(s):
Shikha Jain, Poonam Maurya, Shikha Saini, Shubham Jagga, Anju Jayachandran, Vinay Kumar and Bhargav Kiran

Abstract:
Horticultural crops, especially fruit crops play a significant role in the food and nutritional security of the country. Conventional methods, involving several generations of selfing, are not applicable to produce homozygous lines in fruit crops, due to the high heterozygosity of the genomes, the long duration of the generation cycle, the large size, and, often, the self- incompatibility. The production of haploids and doubled haploids (DHs) through gametic embryogenesis allows a single-step development of complete homozygous lines from heterozygous parents, shortening the time required to produce homozygous plants in comparison with the conventional breeding methods that employ several generations of selfing. In addition, haploids constitute an important material for induction and selection of mutants, particularly for recessive genes, hybrid development, induction of genetic variability, cytogenetic research, genome mapping, etc. In recent years, studies on the molecular basis of microspore embryogenesis have profited from the development of advanced genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and imaging tools, and these tools will likely (and hopefully) result in the identification of many interesting genes involved in microspore reprogramming and embryogenesis in the near future.