Biotechnological Advances and Advanced Mutation Breeding Techniques for Crop Plants

We are heading towards the saturation peaks in terms of genetic variations present naturally across the globe for crop plants. Agricultural productivity is highly dependent on the exploitation of natural variations to breed crops with improved traits. Biotechnological interventions in terms of new technologies such as new generation nucleases, CRISPR-Cas and so forth with the support of conventional mutation breeding and new generation techniques such as MutMap will provide the impetus to drive the future generation of crops. Genetic improvement with the help of advanced generation breeding in terms of variation created and gene pool generated will be enormous and in vitro culture and genetic transformation will sustain such varieties for the long term. These programs had limited success in the past because of their low efficiency, low reproducibility and less applicability among different genotypes of the same crop. In this chapter, we will investigate improvements of the mutation breeding and biotechnological techniques for crop plants, their limitations and their appropriateness for crop breeding.