Heterosis in Plants


Year : 2025 | Volume : 14 | 02 | Page : –
    By

    Shudanshu Rajan Singh,

  1. Student, Department of Biosciences & Biomedical Engineering, IIT Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India

Abstract

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It refers to hybrid vigor or heterosis; herein, the offspring expressed better traits than one or both parent lines. This most often manifests in crop breeding as increased yield in F1 hybrids compared with their parents. Developing high-yielding hybrid cultivars across a wider range of crops represents an important strategy for addressing future food security. However, conventional hybrid breeding approaches are fraught with significant challenges in many self-pollinating crops, such as wheat and barley. For these crops, the advantage of hybrids over inbred cultivars is often too modest to warrant the high costs involved in hybrid seed production. This review discusses the genetic basis of heterosis, points out the challenges of hybrid breeding in self-pollinating crops, and outlines a possible approach to introduce multiple heterosis-associated genes into breeding programs.

Using modern genetic engineering tools, this strategy suggests that supergenes could be constructed by combining heterotic alleles from several loci, thus improving agronomic traits. Using barley as a model self-pollinating crop, we provide a framework for the evaluation of this approach in the context of targeted heterosis-associated genes. This strategy could be applied to other crops when advantageous heterotic gene combinations can be recognized and utilized. Heterosis is the phenomenon where the offspring of different species or crosses between species have higher fertility, biomass, and growth rates than the two parents. A large number of hypotheses, including dominance, overdominance, and pseudo-overdominance, have been provided to explain heterosis. According to this view, the field may gain by leaving behind these ideas, which, by their very nature, limit the interpretation of data, and moving toward a quantitative genetic framework that incorporates interactions in hierarchical networks. We give the details of what has to be explained and a course of investigation that we believe should be successful, although we do not offer a comprehensive model to explain the phenomenology of heterosis.

Keywords: Hybrid, Cultivar, Breeding , Genetic, Allele , Fertility, Biomass

How to cite this article:
Shudanshu Rajan Singh. Heterosis in Plants. Research & Reviews : Journal of Botany. 2025; 14(02):-.
How to cite this URL:
Shudanshu Rajan Singh. Heterosis in Plants. Research & Reviews : Journal of Botany. 2025; 14(02):-. Available from: https://journals.stmjournals.com/rrjob/article=2025/view=0


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Ahead of Print Subscription Review Article
Volume 14
02
Received 24/01/2025
Accepted 12/02/2025
Published 20/02/2025
Publication Time 27 Days
242

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