Plant Breeding From Laboratories To Fields

Download or read book Plant Breeding from Laboratories to Fields written by Sven Bode Andersen and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breeding of crop plants to make them more adapted to human agricultural systems has been on-going during domestication the last 10 000 years. However, only recently with the invention of the Mendelian principles of genetics and the subsequent development of quantitative genetics during the twentieth century has such genetic crop improvement become based on a general theory. During the last 50 years plant breeding has entered a molecular era based on molecular tools to analyse DNA, RNA and proteins and associate such molecular results with plant phenotype. These marker trait associations develop fast to enable more efficient breeding. However, they still leave a major part of breeding to be performed through selection of phenotypes using quantitative genetic tools. The ten chapters of this book illustrate this development.