Management Of Rapeseed Varieties And Breeding Trend In China

China is a country with amount of rapeseed production and consumption, and rapeseed oil is thefirst domestic production for the vegetable oil. However, the self-sufficiency level of edible vegetable oilhas decreased to36%in China. Because of rich in potential fallow paddy field for rapeseed production,Brassica napus L. is the most important and most potential oil crop of most in China.Recent years, many agricultural research institutes and universities have made efforts to breedingrapeseed varieties. Since2001, China have registered the number of rapeseed varieties. With the dataanalysis of registered rapeseed cultivars from2001to2010, we found that all traits (include yield trait,quality trait, etc.) have been improved significantly except growth duration. The coefficients of variationof effective siliques per plant, erucic acid content and branch number were relatively high, indicatingthey had relatively low heritability. The trend of effective siliques per plant was similar to yield withinten years; however, seed per silique and thousand seed weight showed no regularity. The “double low”(low erucic acid and low glucosinolate content in seed) rapeseed varieties have been graduallypopularized in China, but high oil content breeding for rapeseed need to be further strengthened. Amongall agronomic traits, plant height increased from2001to2005and then decreased from2006to2010;growth duration performed ascendant with a wave type and should be noted. All the typically appliedrapeseed varieties showed “double low”, high resistance, well suitability, high yielding and yield stability.There were significant or extremely significant positive correlations between yield and seed per silique,thousand seed weight, oil content, branch number and growth duration; there were extremely significantnegative correlations between yield and Sclerotinia stem rot, index of Sclerotinia stem rot and index ofviral disease; there were no significant correlations between yield and other traits. The path coefficientanalysis results implied that three yield components (effective siliques per plant, seed per silique andthousand seed weight) were the main factors for high-yielding breeding; moreover, oil content, branchnumber, yield stability and growth duration should be considered as well.In the future, yield breeding is undoubtedly the most fundamental goal for Brassica napus L.varieties, and more efforts should be focus on high oil content, suitable for mechanization and earlymaturity. In order to guide the rapeseed breeding, the variaty register departments should further improvethe certification standards (such as increasing oil content, improving disease and shattering resistance,early maturity, etc.) of rapeseed varieties.