Plant breeding is a numbers game and also, time is a very important factor in the course of developing variety.

For instance, start from crossing to release a variety takes about 8 to 10 years typically. However, with technology we have today, molecular markers, you will be able to see in a few minutes, that we can identify genes using molecular markers and then that process will speed up the breeding program in quite a few years.

So we can probably identify traits much quicker and more accurately in a breeding population and it will speed our selection so we can release a variety sooner, in 4 or 5 years. So today I want to touch a little bit the technology we use in our breeding program. That is called molecular marker assisted selection.

Basically we can go collect leaf samples from a plant and then we bring the tissue back here to the grinding, then we run a P.C.R., which generates a lot of DNA copies. And then we run a geosystem; will separate out the bands from those banding patterns we are able to tell which genes are present, which genes are absent in a particular plant. And then using that molecular marking information we will go out and select our plants that carries the gene for a specific trait.

So that process will speed up the accuracy and improve the accuracy of the selection and also speed up the process of the selection. So and that is one thing we do up here in our breeding program using molecular marker technology.