CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS FOR PLANT BREEDING FUTURE: USES OF GERMOPLASM AND MOLECULAR GENETIC

Abstract

The impact of environmental change prospects on plant breeding guidelines will have consequences direct in the development of lines, varieties and hybrids. The challenge of incorporating unimproved germplasm from germplasm banks to improved elite materials, is still unresolved and is becoming more acute as the improvement of plants progress. Having not evaluated genetic resources, there is little basis for establishing scientific methods for using such resources. Environmental and ecological restrictions on germplasm exchange are, in the long term, more restrictive than the current, mainly political, controversies over germplasm exchange. Modern approaches to molecular genetics have much to offer; but, in the case of transformation, they will probably be only for single inheritance characters of great economic importance for which the available field procedures are not effective. Transformation is likely to be of greater relative importance for perennial crops than for annuals, where the field procedures available in conventional breeding result in relatively rapid progress. Diagnostic procedures for monitoring plant diseases may be more important than molecular techniques for forming disease-resistant cultivars.

There appears to be little risk in molecularly engineered crop plants; but, on the other hand, quantitative traits such as yield, general adaptability and heterosis are not appropriate for currently available molecular approaches and will have to be manipulated by conventional plant breeding techniques.