Foxtail Millet Breeding in China

Abstract

Although there is a long history of foxtail millet cultivation in China, modern foxtail millet breeding was only initiated in China in the 1950s and 1960s, with significant progress being made since the 1980s. Most of the research on foxtail millet breeding has been conducted in China, where it is an important regional cereal. The main research activities from the 1950s to 1970s were comparisons among landraces and individual selection, followed by cross-based pedigree selection in the 1970s. These comparisons and cross-based pedigree selections contributed greatly to foxtail millet improvement in China, including the development of the super cultivars ‘Yugu 1’ and ‘Zhaogu 1’ in the 1980s. Radiation and chemical-induced mutations have also been used in foxtail millet breeding to create novel types, such as dwarf lines. Although different types of male sterile lines have been developed over the past 50 years in China, only partial genetic male sterile lines (PAGMS) have been used successfully in hybrid seed production, allowing the use of heterosis to become a reality in recent years. The foxtail millet eco-regions, breeding phases, breeding methodology, and main cultivars grown at different times since the 1950s in China are reviewed in this chapter. With the rapid advances in foxtail millet genomic sciences, mining and elucidation of quantitative trait loci related to important traits will accelerate foxtail millet breeding in the near future.