Impact of Marker Assisted Breeding for Bacterial Blight Resistance in Rice: A Review

Hari Kesh and Prashant Kaushik

Bacterial blight caused by Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) is the major limiting factor in successful rice production. The disease causes around 20-30 % annual loss in rice production and under severe conditions, the yield loss goes upto 50%. The development of resistant genotypes against this disease is the most effective and economic way to control production loss rather than spraying harmful chemicals that affects the environment. In this direction, several varieties with the single resistant gene have been released for cultivation but due to continuous evolution of new pathotypes, there is a continuous breakdown of resistance against the bacterial blight disease. Although durable resistance can be attained by introducing multiple resistant genes in a single desirable genetic background. But with conventional breeding, it is challenging due to dominance and epistatic effects of disease resistance genes against bacterial blight. However, marker-assisted breeding made it possible to identify and introduce multiple genes into a desirable genetic background with rapid, recurrent parent genome recovery and with minimum linkage drag. Molecular markers play a significant role in speeding up the disease resistance breeding programs with different stages like screening, identification, mapping and cloning of disease-resistant genes y. Hereafter, in this review article the application and achievements of marker-assisted breeding in rice against bacterial blight disease was summarized.

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