Plant breeding is considered one of the longest ongoing activities undertaken by humans, who select plants more productive and useful to themselves and the animals for at least 10,000 years ago. The evolution of civilizations paralleled the success of plant breeding, although this has not been recognized by the public. The reason may be lack of understanding of what plant breeding encompasses. ...

Control over management of the world’s resources is increasingly contested because of economic, political and biophysical globalization, and increasing demands of a growing population of more than 6 billion. This has led to new interest in indigenous or traditional knowledge in many areas, including agriculture and plant breeding. Farmers were the first plant breeders, beginning with domesticat...

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...

The recent announcements of the breakthroughs in obtaining the oil palm genome sequence map herald a new chapter in oil palm genetic improvement. These breakthroughs will spur the further development of oil palm genomics. This article examines how genomics would impact plant and oil palm breeding. The knowledge derived from genomics research in terms of the DNA structure of a gene, how it funct...

– Many shorebirds are Nearctic-Neotropical migrants that move from their northern breeding grounds to wintering areas in Central and South America. Shorebirds differ from many other groups of avian migrants by their extremely long and demanding flights, gregariousness, restriction to limited numbers of sites, long lifespans, and low recruitment. Migration monitoring data suggest that population...

Reverse breeding (RB) is a novel plant breeding technique designed to directly produce parental lines for any heterozygous plant, one of the most sought after goals in plant breeding. RB generates perfectly complementing homozygous parental lines through engineered meiosis. The method is based on reducing genetic recombination in the selected heterozygote by eliminating meiotic crossing over. M...

Abstract Participatory plant breeding and rapid sensory evaluation are effective techniques for organic cultivar development. Table beet is an important crop growers, geosmin, a volatile compound which confers earthy aroma, has been suggested as the attribute around hedonic liking of organized. Open pollinated table populations with diverse pigmentation low (LGC) or high (HGC) geosmin concentra...