Plant breeding
Plant Breeding
Plant breeding (/plænt briːdɪŋ/) is the science of altering the traits of plants to produce desired characteristics. It has been used to improve the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals.
Etymology
The term "plant breeding" comes from the English words "plant", which means a living organism of the kind exemplified by trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, ferns, and mosses, typically growing in a permanent site, absorbing water and inorganic substances through its roots, and synthesizing nutrients in its leaves by photosynthesis using the green pigment chlorophyll, and "breeding", which means produce (offspring) by natural processes from the parent stock.
History
Plant breeding started with sedentary agriculture and 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 in an accumulation of beneficial traits over time.
Methods
Plant breeding can be accomplished through many different techniques ranging from simply selecting plants with desirable characteristics for propagation, to more complex molecular techniques (Plant tissue culture, Genetic engineering).
Related Terms
- Genetic engineering: The direct manipulation of an organism's genes using biotechnology.
- Plant tissue culture: A collection of techniques used to maintain or grow plant cells, tissues or organs under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture medium of known composition.
- Hybridization: The process of combining two complementary single-stranded DNA or RNA molecules and allowing them to form a single double-stranded molecule through base pairing.
- Mutation breeding: A process where plants are exposed to chemicals or radiation in order to generate mutants with desirable traits to be bred with other plants.
- Polyploidy: A condition in which the cells of an organism have more than two paired (homologous) sets of chromosomes.
External links
- Medical encyclopedia article on Plant breeding
- Wikipedia's article - Plant breeding
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