The impact of molecular markers on the wheat breeding paradigm.

We briefly review the limited application of marker assisted selection in past wheat breeding programmes, and contrast the current situation, where increasingly it has become feasible to tag almost any gene with a microsatellite assay. Although this capability is having an impact on the conduct of large breeding programmes, a much more profound change in breeding strategy will become possible when SNP technology has matured sufficiently so that the throughput of molecular marker-based genotyping will be able to keep pace with the numbers of plants that breeders can handle in the field. We discuss the considerations that will need to be addressed in the generation of a new breeding paradigm to take advantage of the genomics revolution.