MOLECULAR BREEDING
Molecular breeding Molecular breeding (MB) may be defined in a broad-sense as the use of genetic manipulation performed at DNA molecular levels to improve characters of interest in plants and animals, including genetic engineering or gene manipulation, molecular marker-assisted selection, genomic selection, etc. More often, however, molecular breeding implies molecular marker-assisted breeding (MAB) and is defined as the application of molecular biotechnologies, specifically molecular markers, in combination with linkage maps and genomics, to alter and improve plant or animal traits on the basis of genotypic assays. This term is used to describe several modern breeding strategies, including marker-assisted selection (MAS), marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC), marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS), and genome-wide selection (GWS) or genomic selection (GS) (Ribaut et al., 2010). Marker-assisted breeding MAB is a well-known procedure for the introgressio...