The journey of genetics in the last 100 years has never seen a dull moment. Path breaking discoveries and stimulating concepts have been plenty. These discoveries and concepts are being fully exploited for crop improvement. Conventional approaches in plant breeding is primarily based on phenotypic selection for agronomically important traits, this often encounters considerable difficulties, particularly those posed by genotype x environment interactions. Besides, testing procedures may be many times difficult, unreliable, and expensive due to the nature of the target traits or target environment. Impressive advances in molecular genetics over the last two decades have provided us with a range of tools and techniques for analyzing genomes. Molecular markers, an important outgrowth of modern genetics, are now available in abundance in both plants and animals. Innovative techniques making use of these markers have facilitated analysis of genetic variation reliably and efficiently at the DNA level. Besides, their significant contribution to the basic understanding of the genomes, DNA based markers have shown their value in mapping genes conferring economically important traits in various crop plants. Recent successes in gene tagging, QTL mapping, pyramiding, and marker-assisted selection, shall form the foundation of 'precision breeding'. An efforts have been made about the principals and methods used in molecular breeding aspects in present book. Plants breeders are striving to meet the challenges of increased production by developing plants with higher yield, resistance to pests, diseases and weeds and tolerance to various abiotic stresses, a concerted efforts are made to give suitable examples of the application of molecular markers in the improvement of the crop plants, so that the researchers and students in the field of genetics and breeding, may aware of the impact of molecular breeding in crop improvement. Contents of the book are given below.

By R.K. Singh and Rajesh Singh