Faculty of Science

Objectives

To acquire hands-on industrial training on plant breeding technologies and those used in the generation of transgenics, with very high level specialisation on one of them, e.g. propagation of banana seeds.

Contents

Plant breeding as the art and science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. Plant breeding can be accomplished through many different techniques ranging from simply selecting plants with desirable characteristics for propagation, to more complex molecular techniques.

Classical plant breeding uses deliberate interbreeding (crossing) of closely or distantly related individuals to produce new crop varieties or lines with desirable properties. Classical breeding relies largely on homologous recombination between chromosomes to generate genetic diversity. The classical plant breeder may also make use of a number of in vitro techniques such as protoplast fusion, embryo rescue or mutagenesis (see below) to generate diversity and produce hybrid plants that would not exist in nature.

Traits that breeders have tried to incorporate into crop plants in the last 100 years include:

1. Increased quality and yield of the crop

2. Increased tolerance of environmental pressures (salinity, extreme temperature, drought)

3. Resistance to viruses, fungi and bacteria

4. Increased tolerance to insect pests

5. Increased tolerance of herbicides

Modern plant breeding may use techniques of molecular biology to select, or in the case of genetic modification, to insert, desirable traits into plants. Application of biotechnology or molecular biology is also known as molecular breeding.