Crop Plants for a Sustainable Future Flashcards
What is the importance of selection in designing crop plants of a higher quality and yield?
Selection has been a part of humans’ agricultural interactions with plants immemorial. Whereby plants that appeared the ‘best’, that displayed a favourable phenotype were selected and bred together. Producing offspring with the same trait. Over thousands of years this process of selection has led to the development of commercially vital crop such as maize, from the wild teosinte plant.
What is the traditional crop breeding approach?
The traditional breeding approach put simply involves the repetition of selection and crossing of individuals in a population. Eventually producing a cultivar (population of individuals) that strongly displays the phenotype(s) of interest.
What are the shortcomings of the traditional breeding approach?
The main shortcoming of traditional breeding is that it takes a long time, often over many decades. Also often have to back-cross to get rid of additional genes/ preserve the gene of interest in the genome. Other important genes are often lost through the selection process.
What is haploidy, and how does it contribute to traditional breeding?
Is an important part of tissue culture methodologies. Haploidy individuals are like gametes, containing half the number of chromosomes of a normal individual, and are therefore hemizygous. Hemizygous individuals are much easier to select for, when recessive they grow extremely poorly. Overall reduces the time for selection.
