Plant Breeding

Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals.

Methods:

Conventional Methods

Biotechnological Methods

Conventional Methods

Selection

Selection is the most ancient and basic procedure in plant breeding. It generally involves three distinct steps. First, a large number of selections are made from the genetically variable original population. Second, progeny rows are grown from the individual plant selections for observational purposes. After obvious elimination, the selections are grown over several years to permit observations of performance under different environmental conditions for making further eliminations. Finally, the selected and inbred lines are compared to existing commercial varieties in their yielding performance and other aspects of agronomic importance.

Hybridization

The most frequently employed plant breeding technique is hybridization. The aim of hybridization is to bring together desired traits found in different plant lines into one plant line via cross- pollination. The first step is to generate homozygous inbred lines. This is normally done by using self-pollinating plants where pollen from male flowers pollinates female flowers from the same plants. Once a pure line is generated, it is outcrossed, i. e. combined with another inbred line. Then the resulting progeny is selected for combination of the desired traits. If a trait from a wild relative of a crop species, e.g. resistance against a disease, is to be brought into the genome of the crop, a large quantity of undesired traits (like low yield, bad taste, low nutritional value) are transferred to the crop as well. These unfavorable traits must be removed by time-consuming back-crossing, i. e. repeated crossing with the crop parent.

There are two types of hybrid plants:

 Interspecific and

Intergeneric hybrids.

Beyond this biological boundary, hybridization cannot be accomplished due to sexual incompatibility, which limits the possibilities of introducing desired traits into crop Plants.

Heterosis is an effect which is achieved by crossing highly inbred lines of crop plants. Inbreeding of most crops leads to a strong reduction of vigor and size in the first generations. After six or seven generations, no further reduction in vigor or size is found. When such highly inbred plants are crossed with other inbred varieties, very vigorous, large sized, large-fruited plants may result.

Best Regards
Rebecca Pearson
Editorial Manager