Breeding strategies to consolidate canola among the main crops for biofuels

Canola is a product of traditional plant breeding techniques to remove from rapeseed the antinutritional components erucic acid. This crop proves to be a promising crop due to the diverse purposes of its oil, especially by its potential for biofuel production. This paper aimed to integrate the information available in the literature and report the most promising strategies for genetic and biotechnological progress in canola. Thus, we carried out a detailed review of the origin and uses of canola, its socioeconomic importance in the global and Brazilian aspects, tropicalization, with emphasis on genetic breeding. We demonstrate the main breeding strategies that can be used to increase your oil production. We propose here a breeding strategy for canola, in which some strategies previously mentioned are integrated. The purpose of this strategy is to enhance the selection and efficiency at the beginning of a breeding program. Among these, genome wide selection (GWS) is a suitable tool to help breeders to improve the efficiency selection in a canola breeding program increasing the selection accuracy or even reducing the cycle time. The proposed strategies must be analyzed for each situation, adjusting the GWS model to obtain highest selection accuracy.