There have been many claims that plant breeding would be radically altered by genetic engineering and genetic erosion. There is little doubt that both will affect breeding procedures in the long term; their short term effects are probably minor. A more relevant and immediate concern is the lack of newly-trained Ph.D.s with hands-on experience in plant breeding. Neither public nor private instit...

The injury of plants occasioned by winter conditions has been a subject of great interest and importance to plant breeders and agriculturists. The development of hardy strains has been, and is, one of the principal means of comiibating losses caused by injury from cold, although cultural methods, as well, lhave been adapted to help the plant survive the rigors of its climatic environiment. Reco...

During the past 50 yr, we have witnessed a revolution in the science of plant breeding, genetics, and cytology, and its impact on human lives (e.g., theGreenRevolution). Because of increased productivity, breeding objectives evolved from predominantly improving yield to include greater quality and value-added traits. The discovery of the chemical nature of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), coupled w...

The diagnostic value of skin tests was assessed in 35 patients affected by bird breeder's disease by comparing the results with those obtained in a group of 27 symptomless breeders and 10 symptomless unexposed individuals. Sterilised and diluted serum and lyophilised extracts of faeces prepared from the breeder's own birds were injected intradermally. Skinprick tests using the same materials we...

In the last decade plant biotechnologists and breeders have made several attempt to improve the antioxidant content of plant-derived food. Most efforts concentrated on increasing the synthesis of antioxidants, in particular anthocyanins, by inducing the transcription of genes encoding the synthesizing enzymes. We present here an overview of economically interesting plant species, both food crop...

This chapter deals with breeding aspects of one of the most important crops for food security in the world. Initially it shows how diverse rice is with 22 species, different levels of ploidy and six diversity groups. The choice of parents for crossing, when having such wide genetic diversity available, requires careful characterization and evaluation of the germplasm as well as good knowledge a...

The time to develop new cultivars and introduce them into cultivation is an issue of major importance in plant breeding. This is because plant breeders have an urgent need to help provide solutions to feed a growing world population, while in parallel, time savings are linked to profitability. Plant breeding processes may in general be broken down into the following five key elements: (1) germp...

Aphids are a major family of plant insect pests. Medicago truncatula and Acyrthosiphon pisum (pea aphid, PA) are model species with a suite of resources available to help dissect the mechanism underlying plant-aphid interactions. A previous study focused on monogenic and relatively strong resistance in M. truncatula to PA and other aphid species. In this study a moderate resistance to PA was ch...

A trade-off between fecundity and life expectancy is fundamental to most theories on the evolution of life histories and ageing. In fact, sexual reproduction has been shown to reduce lifespan in a large number of species across all biological taxa [1]. The only exception known thus far are eusocial hymenopterans, with reproducing queens usually living much longer than the sterile workers [2]. H...

This review paper contains some of the places of interest of modern plant biotechnology and discusses the possible uses of biotechnology in the betterment of agricultural systems. Plant biotechnology will make easy the farming of crops with numerous strong resistances to pathogens and diseases, mainly in the dearth of pesticides. Similarly, transgenes or marker-assisted assortment may help out ...