Importance of Marker Assisted Selection in Fish Breeding in India: Challenges and Opportunities - Abstract
The important economical traits like body growth, resistance to diseases, meat quality, etc. highly influence the profitability of the food animals including fishes. The main target of
every selective breeding programme is to produce improve offspring for these traits. However, improvement of performance traits through traditional phenotype-based selection needs several generations to optimise these characters. Other problems associated with the traditional breeding programme is the maintenance of each generation and complexity of the measure qualitative trait such as meat quality. Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS) can be the best alternative to solve these problems. Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS) is a type of indirect method of selection of better performing breeding individuals. MAS depends on identifying the link between a genetic marker and Quantitative traits loci (QTL). The distance between marker and target traits determines the association of the marker with the QTL. After identifying the markers linked to QTL, they can be used in the selective breeding programme to select the brooders having better genetic potential for the targeted trait. Improvement of performance traits through MAS is fast and more accurate and allows us to understand the genetic mechanism affecting performance traits.