What is plant breeding?

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 Definition

The science, art, and technology of enhancing plants for human use is known as plant breeding. It entails choosing, crossing, and creating plant varieties with desired characteristics like improved quality, disease resistance, high yield, and environmental adaptation.

To put it simply, plant breeding is the methodical process of creating new and enhanced crop varieties to satisfy the demands of industries, farmers, and consumers. 

To me, plant breeding is an enterprise that develops a product, i.e., seed.

Explaination

To find superior plants and use them as parents for hybridization, plant breeders apply concepts from genetics, cytology, molecular biology, and statistics. To maintain desired traits, the progeny are subsequently assessed and chosen over a number of generations.

The following are the main steps in plant breeding:

A Variation collection (genetic diversity)

B Choosing parents who possess the desired qualities

C Crossing chosen parents is known as hybridization.

D Selection and segregation among offspring

E Testing and assessment in various settings

F Launch and marketing of a new variety

Breeders use these procedures to convert genetic potential into practical productivity.

Plant Breeding as an Enterprise Whose Product Is a Variety

Another way to think of plant breeding is as an enterprise, a professional, goal-oriented endeavor that yields a product with quantifiable worth. In this case, the end result of plant breeding is a new plant variety rather than a tangible product like a pesticide or fertilizer.

Steps

1. The Enterprise Viewpoint

An enterprise is a structured activity that creates an output with economic, social, or scientific value using inputs such as labor, capital, and technology.

Likewise, scientific inputs like these are used in plant breeding:

A Genetic resources (wild relatives, landraces, and germplasm)

B Human knowledge (geneticists, pathologists, and plant breeders)

C Infrastructure (fields, greenhouses, and laboratories)

D Technology (bioinformatics, gene editing, molecular markers)

Over time, these inputs are carefully mixed to create new plant varieties that are more productive, resilient to stress, and appropriate for contemporary farming systems.

2. The Good: A Range

The end result of breeding is a variety, sometimes referred to as a cultivar. A genetically stable, unique, homogeneous group of plants with particular traits that set them apart from one another is called a variety.

Three essential requirements must be fulfilled by each released variety:

A Distinctness: It must be distinctly different from current types.

B Uniformity: Every plant in the variety needs to share the same traits.

C Stability: Its characteristics must not change from generation to generation.

The variety is released and notified for commercial cultivation once these requirements are met, and it passes official trials and multi-location testing.

In the same way that a software developer's product is an app or an engineer's product is a machine, the breeder's "product" is the variety.

3. Social and Economic Significance

Every new type of plant helps with:

A  A rise in agricultural output

B Better nutrition and food quality

C Adaptability to diseases, pests, and climate stress

D Increased revenue for farmers

E Use of resources sustainably

By increasing yields and guaranteeing food security, varieties such as Sonora 64 (wheat), Nirmal (maize), and IR8 (rice) have revolutionized agriculture. These are quintessential instances of successful "products" from plant breeding.

4. Plant Breeding as an Ongoing Business

Plant breeding is a continuous endeavor rather than a one-time event due to the ever-changing environmental challenges and pest pressures.
Breeders need to always:

A Examine wild species for novel genes.

B Use the latest biotechnological instruments.

C Create varieties that are suited to shifting consumer demands and climates.

Contemporary plant breeding has developed into a high-tech industry that incorporates:

A Breeding molecule

B Selection by genome

C Breeding at high speed

D Gene editing using CRISPR

Conclusion

Breeding plants is a business as well as a science.
It is a science that uses biotechnology, statistics, and genetics to enhance plants.
In the end, farmers and society gain from the company's new variety, which is the product of years of research, evaluation, and selection.

In brief:

The creation and distribution of a new, enhanced, and stable plant variety is the ultimate aim and output of the organized business known as plant breeding.

Similar to a contemporary, research-driven industry, these advancements speed up, improve accuracy, and increase profitability in the breeding process.

Keywords: plant breeding definition, plant breeding as an enterprise, product of plant breeding, crop improvement, new variety development, plant breeder’s role, modern plant breeding, crop genetics, variety release process

(Note: The article was created by ChatGPT; however, conceptualization, review, and editing of this article were done by Dr. UKS Kushwaha.)


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