The narrow genetic base of modern crop cultivars is a serious obstacle to sustain and improve crop productivity due to rapidly occurring vulnerability of genetically uniform cultivars to potentially new biotic and abiotic stresses. However, many agriculturally important traits such as productivity and quality, tolerance to environmental stresses, and some of forms of disease resistance are quantitative (also called polygenic, continuous, multifactorial, or complex traits) in nature and the jargon used by molecular biologists, the utility of DNA markers in plant breeding may not be clearly understood by non-molecular biologists. Recognizing the enormous potential of DNA markers in plant breeding, many agricultural research centers and plant breeding institutes have adopted the capacity for marker development and marker-assisted selection (MAS).This review provides an introduction to DNA markers, QTL and the concept of polymorphism, the principles and methods of QTL analysis and also different types markers may be applied in breeding programs using MAS.

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