Back to the future: revisiting MAS as a tool for modern plant breeding

KEY MESSAGE: New models for integration of major gene MAS with modern breeding approaches stand to greatly enhance the reliability and efficiency of breeding, facilitating the leveraging of traditional genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is well recognised as contributing essential variation to crop breeding processes, and marker-assisted selection is cited as the primary tool to bring this diversity into breeding programs without the associated genetic drag from otherwise poor-quality genomes of donor varieties. However, implementation of marker-assisted selection techniques remains a challenge in many breeding programs worldwide. Many factors contribute to this lack of adoption, such as uncertainty in how to integrate MAS with traditional breeding processes, lack of confidence in MAS as a tool, and the expense of the process.…