Molecular Breeding of Tef

Tef is the most important food security crop in Ethiopia. As a result, a dedicated national tef improvement program has been established to facilitate its improvement using conventional breeding. However, the inherent limitations of this breeding method and the continuous progress in crop genomics necessitated its complementation by molecular tools. Modern plant breeding approaches involving molecular markers, such as marker assisted breeding, QTL mapping, gene mining and genetic transformation including gene editing have been used to develop new varieties in several crop species.