Abstract: With the development of molecular marker technologies and detection techniques and the decrease in the exploitation and application cost, molecular-assisted selection (MAS) shows superior applications in crop breeding. This paper reviews the advances in gene pyramiding, gene transfer and quantity trait improvements with MAS and summarizes the influence factors, such as the distance between the gene of interest and markers, trait heredity, individual number of breeding population, and marker number, type and phase. As a result, we propose that strategies for crop breeding with MAS include mapping and breeding at the same time, determining molecular marker type and number, simplifying the DNA extraction methods, and stepwise selection of background selection with a suitable scheme.

Key words: Molecular-assisted selection (MAS), Crop breeding, Quality trait, Quantitative trait loci