Applications of Plant Breeding

Introduction

Plant Breeding is basically the technique in which different plants are modified in a number of ways to get better results out of the crops. It could be done to enrich the nutritional value of the plant, disease-resistant, temperature control, soil salinity, and even to improve the aesthetics. If one explores the application of plant breeding, they can find that breeders often try to improve the food safety standard of their plants through it.

Application of Plant Breeding

Increase in the Yield

One of the main targets of breeding plants with special techniques like hybridisation is to increase the production of the yield. This is a fantastic application of plant breeding as one can easily get a huge amount of benefits due to specially prepared crops.

One example is sugarcane production. As one might know, the most Indian sugarcane, also known as Saccharum Barberi, is very thin and doesn’t have lots of sugar content. If such sugarcane were grown for business purposes, the farmers would only be in loss. The main reason why we say that is because it takes the same amount of time and effort to grow sugarcane with lesser quality. Scientists came up with the idea to make a hybrid by combining the special South Indian sugarcane, also known as Sacrum Orifice, to make thick sugar cane with a high amount of carbohydrate.

Boost in the Nutritional Value

Getting plants with high nutritional value can be very costly. But with the help of plant breeding, you can always get a better cost-effective way for increasing the nutritional value in the crops one consumes.

With the development and growth in science and technologies, there are various crops that are cultivated with special plant breeding techniques. Golden rice, which is rich in vitamins, is one of the products of plant breeding, which has enriched nutrients and a lesser amount of carbohydrates.

Improvement in Aesthetics

The word aesthetics means beauty. Many plants are also known for their beauty. These hybrid flowers and plants could be used as decoration. But in order to increase the market sales, the flowers must look attractive.

There are many plants that are the targets of big businesses. Moreover, to help these plants smell and look good to attract more customers, a special plant breeding technique is done, which increases flower sales.

Application of Mutation Breeding

To learn the Application of Mutation Breeding in making a better plant product, you must understand the concept of mutation. A mutation is basically the change in the genetic constituent of a species by accident, or it could also be induced in the plant, as in the case of plant breeding.

Once such mutations are done on the plant, it could affect the plant’s chromosomal makeup, which will eventually induce certain characteristics and features in the plant. The application of mutation breeding becomes very tricky as it deals with minor manipulations. If any of this manipulation gets wrong, the whole crop gets destroyed. On the other hand, an uncontrolled mutation might make the crop develop some uncertain and unwanted characteristics that can even lead to the destruction of the main genetic constituent of the plant.

Nevertheless, the application of mutation breeding has been very effective in development in the field of cereals and rice. There are even special dwarf plants that are actually developed for shorter growing periods.

Role of Biotechnology in Plant Breeding

Biotechnology plays the biggest role possible in plant breeding. Biotechnology deals with different techniques in which genetic transfers are made to enrich the species and produce a better one. These days, even special techniques, such as vectors and other pathogens, are used to inject such genetic material into the host cell. A few most used techniques of plant breeding are:

• Selection: Progeny rows are developed using genetically distinct plants for observations. Then performance and yield are compared from other commercial plants
• Hybridisation: It follows a cross-pollination technique to combine desired traits from different plants
• Polyploidy: Chemicals are used to increase chromosome counts in plants
• Induced mutation: Radiations or chemicals are used to introduce plant mutation

With better biotechnology procedures, the minerals and other special components required in the desired plant are inserted by special biological methods with better biotechnology procedures. All these methods belong to the microbiology section, and if one uses them in the right manner, there is a high possibility of getting the desired plant without a lot of loss of the natural extracts of the plant.

Environmental Stress

The biggest threat to your crop culture is environmental stress. The most important use-case of applications of plant breeding comes into play here. If the breeding of the plants can be controlled in a specific way, one can increase their tolerance capacity. This means that the plant will no longer depend on a certain amount of water or a certain amount of soil salinity. Researchers have even managed to make plants grow without sunlight. Hence tackling environmental stress is the best application of plant breeding.

Conclusion

If we start to make a list of the applications of plant breeding, then it might be challenging to put all of them in one write-up. However, we covered its roles in better yield, boosting nutritional value and for commercial use. The field is huge, and we hope that you got to learn something new from today’s concept of the applications of plant breeding.