ABSTRACT
The world of genetics began with the simple experiments of the Austrian monk Gregor J. Mendel on garden pea plants, which suggested the existence of genes. Technological advances in sequencing have greatly accelerated the accumulation of genetic sequence data to the point that now whole genome sequences are publicly available for a large number of organisms, including many crop plants. Screening under specific biotic and abiotic conditions may allow understanding the process of growth and development in plants, photo-morphogenesis, plant-pathogen interaction. RNA interference is one of the most exciting breakthroughs of the past decade in functional genomics and promises to be a very useful instrument for determining the function of gene. Forward genetics is more time consuming than reverse genetics because it involves the process called “genetic mapping.” Variation in the breeding process can be brought using radiation or chemical mutagens such as ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS). The mutagenic substance EMS preferentially alkylates guanine bases.
