Yield and stability in cereals: past achievements and future progress

Abstract

Future breeding must be even more efficient than in the recent past to keep increasing cereal productivity at a pace similar to that of population growth. To achieve this objective, breeders may need to complement traditional approaches with the use of new knowledge from crop physiology and new tools from molecular biology. Advances in molecular biology seem auspicious for helping increasing crop productivity; but this hope in the case of complex traits is, at best, doubtful. Recognizing the attributes that were responsible of past success may help identify prospect traits for the future to be used either directly in traditional approaches or through biotechnological tools. Retrospective analyses of physiological bases of yield improvement together with a sound physiological model of yield determination may help identifying promising traits. A short discussion is offered in which these approaches are combined.