The purpose of this study was to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB). Seventy-six breeders were randomly selected from among 95 breeders who were working at the Seed and Plant Improvement Institute, Karaj, Iran. Data were collected by a questionnaire as the main data collection instrument. The face and content validity of the questionnaire was appr...

The article reevaluates the reception of Mendelism in France, and more generally considers the complex relationship between Mendelism and plant breeding in the first half on the twentieth century. It shows on the one side that agricultural research and higher education institutions have played a key role in the development and institutionalization of genetics in France, whereas university biolo...

Quantitative genetics (in its various guises) has been the intellectual cornerstone of plant breeding for close to 100 years. While the roots of Mendelian genetics, and its rediscovery, are firmly in the hands of plant breeders, it was Fisher's (1918) variance decomposition paper that marks the modern foundation for both quantitative genetics and plant breeding. We are now embarking on the age ...

For millennia, seeds have been freely available to use for farming and plant breeding without restriction. Within the past century, however, intellectual property rights (IPRs) have threatened this tradition. In response, a movement has emerged to counter the trend toward increasing consolidation of control and ownership of plant germplasm. One effort, the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI, www...

While animal breeders largely focus on improvement using additive genetic variance, inbreeding and asexual reproduction allow plant breeders to at least partially exploit nonadditive genetic variance as well. We briefly review various approaches used by breeders to exploit dominance and epistatic variance, discuss their constraints and limitations, and examine what (if anything) can be done to ...

Plant breeding, the science of crop production, has traditionally developed new cultivars through selective breeding in the spirit of Gregor Mendel (1965) and his peas. Plant breeders hybridize plants that have been selected for some desired trait. By hybridizing desirable plants, desirable alleles—and combinations of alleles—are concentrated, thereby improving the fitness of the offspring. Pla...

Coizclusion The composition of cereal grains has had relatively little attention so far from plant breeders. ‘There appears to be scope for improvement in the quantity and quality of the proteins and in the quantities of some other components, notably oil and fibre. Changes in starch composition are also evidently possible. The indications are that searches for plant material with special quali...