Crop Molecular Breeding in China: Current Status and Perspectives

With some technological breakthroughs such as sequencing and microarray in the recent years, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics have made a great progress in the world. Theories and technologies of crop have also been revolutionarized considerably. Traditional crop is based on phenotypic selection, which is often called empirical breeding with poor predictability, long cycle and low efficiency. Modern crop molecular including marker-assisted breeding, transgenic and molecular design has become an important direction in the field of plant breeding. It is based on the combination of genotypic selection and phenotypic selection and thus target genes/alleles can be directly selected and pyramided. Therefore, the efficiency of molecular can be improved and the duration can be shortened. The paper defines the concept of molecular breeding, briefly analyzes current status and issues of crop molecular in China, and discusses strategies in the future.