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6.3. Selection of parents and crossesIn sugarcane, studies have suggested that sugar content, and related measurements such as juice brix content, have a high proportion of the total genetic variance under additive genetic control (Brown et al.,1968, 1969; Hogarth, 1971a, 1987; Hogarth et al.,1981). This contrasts with the other major character under selection in sugarcane breeding programs, cane yield, in which non-additive genetic control is more important (Hogarth, 1987). This indicates that, in breeding programs, selection of parents with high sugar content should be effective in producing high sugar content progeny, more so than with cane yield.Further, results from the first molecular marker studies in sugarcane involving mapping quantitative trait loci(QTL) suggest that sugar content is controlled by a large number of segregating alleles, each of relatively small effect, as opposed to being under control by a small number of genes with large effect (Hoarau et al.,2001; Ming et al., 2002). The presence of a large number of segregating loci in parental clones would imply that the probability of obtaining progeny clones with near to the best combination of alleles in a single crossing cycle is low. This situation and the high narrow sense heritability of sugar content means that recurrent selection programs based on sugar content should be effective in improving this trait. There is some empirical evidence supporting this, with promising results from such programs being reported(Legendre, 1995; Lo and Chen, 1995; Cox, 1999;Anthony Kennedy, West Indies Central Sugarcane Breeding Station, personal communication). However,an important issue in the value of such programs in producing cultivars (compared with programs based on selection for a combination of cane yield and sugar content) is whether at least some of the genes under co-selection with sugar content or its components have negative effects on cane yield (due to plieotropy or linkage), and this is not yet clear.
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