Advanced tools for sugarcane breeding in response to environmental stresses

BUDEGUER, FLORENCIA; ENRIQUE, RAMÓN

Biotechnological Transformation for Sugarcane Management

Taylor & Francis on line

Año: 2023;

Modern sugarcane cultivars possess a high genetic complexity, which makes traditionalbreeding extremely laborious, costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, in some cases, thetraits of interest are not found in cultivated germplasm or directly related germplasm, makingsexual transfer impossible. As sugarcane production is strongly influenced by biotic and abiotic stresses, conventional breeding supported by biotechnological strategies constantly seeks to develop new genotypes with higher sugar and biomass yields and greater environmental stress tolerance. In this sense, elite varieties are the starting material for crop improvement through genetic engineering to add new traits that confer adaptive advantages to overcome the above mentioned stresses. Among the available biotechnological tools, the Genetic Transformation (GT) technology, which is capable of incorporating genes from a wide variety of plant and non-plant sources into crops, and the Genome Editing (GE), capable of editing, inserting or replacing specific sequences within the genome, are of great importance. Both techniques allow the improvement of the genomes of elite sugarcane varieties. However, gene editing offers some advantages over GT that could drastically reduce the time and costs associated with a commercial deregulation process.