**4. Potential application of OMICS approaches in hybrid rice breeding**

Recent advancement in molecular biology has offered tremendous opportunities to the breeder and breeding *per se* in enhancement in their efficacy and speed up the varietal development process. It has diverse applications like mapping, tagging, amplification-based cloning, gene pyramiding, marker-assisted selection (MAS/ MARS), fingerprinting applications, including varietal identification, ensuring seed purity, phylogeny and evolution studies, diversity analysis, and elimination of germplasm duplication. The progress in research related to application of DNA marker technology in hybrid rice improvement may be valuable in following way.
