A Complete Informative Guide to Know Everything about Plant Breeding
Plant breeding is carried out among selected plants to develop the desired characteristics. In the process, genetic features of two or more plants are combined to develop a completely new variety of plant with the characteristic features present in parent plants. With the help of plant breeding one can make better crops and nourishing food. Requirement for Plant Breeding
For plant breeding, you require seed of the plant whose characteristics you are interested in. It can be the color of the plant, size, and resistance to insects or any other thing. For instance, when a farmer wants to grow big juicy fruits, he will have to breed seeds of plants that yield big juicy fruits. As there are a number of plants are there in nature, you have to choose wisely so that the characteristic will exactly come out as per your requirement.
Crossing Plants and Finding Genetic Diversity For crossing plants, breeders have to go through the variety of seeds that matches their requirements. • They can initially look for the required seeds among the cultivators. If they can’t find one, they can look through collections of wild ancestors of crops and seeds.
• The breeder can also take seeds from the gene pool of all the related species that they think can be crossed with crop.
• If the above doesn’t work out and breeding is not possible, they can go for genetic engineering.
Crossing Plants
You must know properly that which seed is used for the cross breeding. The plant breeder must be aware of the parent crop of the selected seed.
• The crossing is done manually in most of the cases.
• First, the breeder has to remove all the male organs of flowers to ensure that the plant do not fertilise itself.
• Then, female parents are prepared for the cross.
• The breeder than has to deposit the pollen grains from the male parent into female part of the emasculated flower. This is usually done by a brush.
• The crosses are later bagged to prevent other pollens from reaching the flower as they can contaminate the flower. If you have successfully performed the cross, the fruit will start developing and seeds will be formed.
Gene Banks
When you have to perform a cross breeding for plants, gene banks are the ultimate source for the best seeds. They are the repositories to collect, store and catalogue biological material. They have wide range of seeds and crop cuttings with a wide range of different characteristics that you can choose from. Also many researches are carried out using these biological materials from the bank.
Seeds of required characteristic can be chosen and used for cross breeding. This is an efficient method to produce better quality crops. There have been several experiments and researches conducted on cross breeding of plants over the past few years.
About the Author
If you wish to produce plants of desired quality, you can visit the Gooderham Horticulture Ltd, an independent nursery in UK, where you can find wide range of plants. Here you can have full knowledge about new plant patents , trials and cross breeding properties.
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