Improvement of bacterial blight resistance of the popular variety, Nellore Mahsuri (NLR34449) through marker-assisted breeding.

To combat the dreaded diseases in rice like bacterial blight (BB) and blast, host plant resistance has been advocated as the most suitable and sustainable method. Through the present study, we have successfully incorporated three major BB resistance genes, namely , and into NLR3449, a high yielding, blast resistant, fine-grain type, popular rice variety through marker-assisted backcross breeding. Foreground selection was carried out using polymerase chain reaction based, gene-specific markers, namely pTA248 (), xa13prom () and xa5FM () at each generation of backcrossing, while 127 polymorphic SSR markers spanning on 12 chromosomes were used for background selection and backcrossing was limited to two rounds.