Time to crop: jumping from biological models to crop biotechnology

Abstract

Model organisms are useful systems to understand the complexity of mechanisms behind life. In the past, each aspectof biology possessed its own model species, but with the advent of molecular biology, it was necessary to investigate with great intensitya few chosen species aiming at having a whole idea on how biological mechanisms function altogether and Arabidopsis thaliana waselected as the prime working model in plant science. With the completion of its genome sequencing, other plant models rose as workablesystems at the molecular level and now one can see a blossoming of plant species, including many crops, that have at least part of theirgenome sequence unveiled. Plant breeding is one of the fields that will benefit enormously from these studies, since knowing the genomesequence of a given species can lead to link the Mendelian genetics to its molecular bases, making breeding programs to advance morequickly.

Keywords

• evolution
• functional genetics
• genomics
• molecular breeding
• physical mapping.