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Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. [1] It is used to improve the quality of plant products for use by humans and animals. [2] The goals of plant breeding are to produce crop varieties that boast unique and superior traits for a variety of applications.
Mutation breeding, sometimes referred to as "variation breeding", is the process of exposing seeds to chemicals, radiation, or enzymes [1] [2] in order to generate mutants with desirable traits to be bred with other cultivars. Plants created using mutagenesis are sometimes called mutagenic plants or mutagenic seeds.
Plant breeding started with sedentary agriculture, particularly the domestication of the first agricultural plants, a practice which is estimated to date back 9,000 to 11,000 years. Initially, early human farmers selected food plants with particular desirable characteristics and used these as a seed source for subsequent generations, resulting ...
A key event in the conservation of plant genetic resources was the establishment of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) (now Bioversity International) in 1974, whose mandate was to promote and assist in the worldwide effort to collect and conserve the plant germplasm needed for future research and production. IBPGR ...
Farmers have manipulated plants and animals through selective breeding for decades of thousands of years in order to create desired traits. In the 20th century, a surge in technology resulted in an increase in agricultural biotechnology through the selection of traits like the increased yield, pest resistance, drought resistance, and herbicide resistance.
Plant breeders use different methods depending on the mode of reproduction of crops, which include: Self-fertilization, where pollen from a plant will fertilise reproductive cells or ovules of the same plant; Cross-pollination, where pollen from one plant can only fertilize a different plant
Micropropagation has a number of advantages over traditional plant propagation techniques: The main advantage of micropropagation is the production of many plants that are clones of each other. Micropropagation can be used to produce disease-free plants.
Traditional mixed crop (polyculture) cultivation of cacao and banana, Trinidad, 1903 Modern plant breeders develop new crop varieties to meet specific conditions. A new variety might, for example, be higher yielding, more disease resistant or have a longer shelf life than the varieties from which it was bred.