Field Crop 2025, Vol.8, No.1, 1-10 http://cropscipublisher.com/index.php/fc 2 saline-alkali land. Finally, I want to say that this research is not only to summarize the existing results, but also to point the way for future breeding work. After all, climate change is there, we have to prepare more resistant and higher-yielding varieties in advance. 2 Traditional Breeding Techniques in Sorghum 2.1 Conventional breeding methods Sorghum is quite interesting. Although it is mainly self-pollinated (usually 85%-95%), it occasionally "crosses over"-the cross-pollination rate is about 5% to 15% (Rakshit and Bellundagi, 2019; Tu et al., 2023). When it comes to breeding goals, everyone is most concerned about increasing the yield and maintaining stability, but now more and more people are also thinking about how to make sorghum more resistant to diseases and pests. Interestingly, abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity have become a research hotspot in recent years. Of course, breeders are also thinking about reducing anti-nutritional factors and improving protein quality-although this is quite difficult. The choice of method actually depends on the purpose. If you want to make conventional varieties, you can use the old method of self-pollination. But if you want to cultivate hybrids, you have to see if there is a suitable male sterile source at hand. After all, hybrid vigor is not something that can be achieved casually. 2.2 Limitations of traditional breeding approaches Traditional breeding has indeed helped us solve many problems, but to be honest, it is not a panacea. One of the biggest troubles is that with each generation of selection, the gene pool of good varieties has become narrower and narrower (Jordan et al., 2011). Some people have suggested that we find some wild or unimproved germplasm to enrich genetic diversity? But the problem is that the offspring of these "outsiders" and cultivated varieties often perform poorly. Besides, traditional breeding is already very tiring. It takes seven or eight generations to stabilize a trait (Figure 1). Especially for complex traits like yield, there are too many influencing factors-genes and environment are both messing around (Sukumaran et al., 2016), and sometimes breeders are really powerless. Figure 1 A flow diagram showing the development of sorghum varieties utilizing landraces through a pedigree selection (2010-2015) followed by multi-environment trials (2016-2018) (Adopted from Kumar et al., 2021)
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