Genetic Gains in Grain Yield of a Maize Population Improved through Marker Assisted Recurrent Selection under Stress and Non-stress Conditions in West Africa.

Marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) is a breeding method used to accumulate favorable alleles that for example confer tolerance to drought in inbred lines from several genomic regions within a single population. A bi-parental cross formed from two parents that combine resistance to with drought tolerance, which was improved through MARS, was used to assess changes in the frequency of favorable alleles and its impact on inbred line improvement. A total of 200 testcrosses of randomly selected S lines derived from the original (C) and advanced selection cycles of this bi-parental population, were evaluated under drought stress (DS) and well-watered (WW) conditions at Ikenne and under artificial infestation at Abuja and Mokwa in Nigeria in 2014 and 2015.