Don’s link brings one to 2010. Here is a very recent one that fortunately is available in full, free,
I’ve decided to follow up on David B.'s response just a bit. I’ve been working with genetic markers since the 80s. In my opinion they are quite useful when it comes to sorting out parentage or relatedness questions. There are some examples of using them to follow single-gene traits that are difficult to phenotype (soybean cyst nematode resistance genes), or for rapidly recovering the recurrent parent’s genome when introgressing a GMO event (Bt & RR in corn). And they certainly hold a lot of promise for species such as trees that have a long generation time.
As a breeder who is not working with a long generation time species (roses), who is interested in many traits that are relatively easy to screen for and these traits for the most part are simply inherited, I do not see the usefulness.
In the corn world (my day job) I know that changing germplasm pools, will change marker trait relationships for even some of the simply inherited traits. For quantitative traits, they are using markers to understand how selection has shaped the genome over 70+ years. They are using markers to enrich the frequency of regions that are thought to be important in segregating populations. But these segregating populations are then turned over to breeders and run through traditional testing and selection.
I was listening to a podcast of a talk at the Commonwealth Club in which someone mentioned this:
which is a high-tech version of the self-help auto garage concept. For a relatively low monthly fee you can play with the toys in a state-of-the-art R&D shop. Inexperience is no barrier - if you need to learn to run the 3-D printer, set up the CNC machine or calculate supersonic flows in fluid dynamic software then, well, they have a class for that.
One has to wonder how long it will be until they build an annex loaded with biotech toys (in which case I could build my cell phone seedling scanner myself).
A recent development in CRISPR technology has been made public that eliminates the need for any PCR in screening for partricular genetic traits. This means no messy chemicals and stinky vent hood.
I think we should write a ROSBREE proposal for my screening app which now looks like a very feasible project.
A couple of posts above (and a decade ago) I speculated about a device that “would plug into my smart-phone on which I could run an app that allows me to scan the seedling’s bar code and send the answer (trait/no trait) right to my database. The screen would flash green or red telling me whether to keep or toss the seedling on the spot.”
Although not quite the same thing, these folks at Sichuan University have come up with a way to screen for pathogens in the field using a smartphone and a microneedle.
"Here, we report an in-field molecular diagnostic tool that uses a cheap colorimetric paper and a smartphone, allowing multiplexed, low-cost, rapid detection of crop pathogens… When coupled with a microneedle for rapid nucleic acid extraction and a smartphone app for results analysis, the sample-to-result test can be completed in ~10 min in the field. "
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