Molecular breeding for improving yield in maize: recent advances and future perspectives.

Abstract This chapter clarifies plant breeding and its underlying molecular basis, then reviews the molecular technologies that have been developed thus far for enhanced plant breeding, which are necessary to better understand the applications and perspectives of these molecular technologies for enhanced maize breeding. This chapter updates the recent advances of the molecular technologies for maize grain yield breeding in the past decade and compares these molecular technologies and underlines their perspectives for continued maize yield improvement.