Sugarcane (Saccharum sps. hybrids) is one of the most
important commercial sugar producing cash crops of India
for both farmers and the industry. It is the source of
approximately 50% of the world’s sugar. Sugarcane is always
a challenging crop to the plant breeders and biotechnologist
due to its complex genomic architecture, long duration and
small inconvenient flower size. Until the early 1990s, breeder
knew little about the sugarcane genome or the genetic
composition of sugarcane at the molecular level and selections
were based solely on phenotypic evaluations (Burner and
Legendre, 1993; Duckelman and Legendre, 1982). Compared
to other crops, it is extremely difficult to make high quality
sugarcane crosses due to the fact that sugarcane has irregular
meiosis as well as unusual inheritance of quantitative traits
and also difficult to hybridize due to tiny size of flower. The
combination of genes for sugar with other agronomic traits is
difficult to combine and time taking in conventional breeding
programme due to linkage and complex polyploid of which
creates hindrance in the inheritance of desired combination of
sugar and disease resistance. In conventional sugarcane
variety improvement programs one cycle takes, on average,
10 years from hybridization to the release of cultivars.