Question

short note on the improvement of crops

Answer 1

Crop improvement, the engineering of plants for the benefit of humanity, is as old as agriculture itself. Some 10,000 years ago, primitive people made the transition from hunting and foraging to cultivating crops. With that switch began the continuous process of improving the plants on which we depend for food, fiber, and feed.Throughout the milennia, two techniques have been used to improve crops, according to Lawrence Bogorad, a plant molecular biologist at Harvard University. The first is selection, which draws on the genetic variation inherent in plants. The earliest farmers selected plants having advantageous traits, such as those that bore the largest fruit or were the easiest to harvest. Perhaps through some rudimentary awareness that traits were passed from one generation to the next, the choicest plants and seeds were used to establish the next year's crop. Natural selection, which determines the survival of species, was now augmented by artificial selection. By selecting and isolating choice plants for cultivation, the early farmers were in essence influencing which plants would cross-pollinate. Through selection and isolation, they were narrowing, yet controlling, the available gene pool for each crop.

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Answer 2

To domesticate crops, farmers saved the seeds from their best plants to use the following season. This process of "selective breeding" made crops that were bigger, more productive, tastier, or prettier than their wild ancestors. But because only the individuals with the most useful traits were used to produce the next generation, it also reduced the crops' genetic diversity. As crops were improved and customized to grow in different locations, gene variations that might help them resist a new challenge—say a new disease or pest, drought, or a different habitat—were often lost.

The good news is that helpful genetic variations may still be available in the crop plants' wild cousins, or in less-improved or heirloom varieties. These relatives can be a reservoir of genetic diversity—plant breeders just need to figure out how to get the right genes into the crop plant. Read on to learn how this is done using "traditional" breeding methods and with newer methods that use genomic tools: marker-assisted breeding, transgenic technology, and gene editing.