Swapan Kumar Tripathy

Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, College of Agriculture, OUAT, Bhubaneswar, India
Author    Correspondence author
Genomics and Applied Biology, 2019, Vol. 10, No. 2   
Received: 15 Jul., 2018    Accepted: 17 Aug., 2018    Published: 03 Feb., 2019

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Maize being the third important cereal food crop next to rice and wheat; it seems to be a good candidate for biofortification. Quality of food and feed depend on protein content and amino acid balance. α-zeins are the major prolamin fraction of seed protein in maize. These are rich in glutamine, leucine and proline but, deficient in essential amino acids like lysine and tryptophan causing malnutrition. However, discovery of opaque 2 mutation and modifier complexes made it possible to develop modified QPM genotypes and hybrids. In this pursuit, the authors presented a detailed review of the status of seed protein, amino acid composition, genetic mechanism of opaque 2 mutation, mapping of o2 gene and modifier complexes, nature of inheritance of o2 allele and breeding strategies for nutritional amelioration in maize.

Quality protein maize (QPM); opaque-2; Nutritional value; Introgression lines; QPM hybrids