Question

You are a Botanist working in the area of plant breeding. Describe the various steps that you will undertake to release a new variety.

Answer 1

Plant breeding programmes are carried out in a systematic way world in government institutions and commercial companies.

The main steps in breeding a new genetic of a crop are:

1. Collection of variability: Genetic is the root of any breeding programmme in many crop pre-existing genetic variability is available from wild relatives of the crop. Collection and preservation of all the different wild varieties, species and relatives of the cultivated species (followed by their evaluation for their characteristics) is pre-requisite for effective exploitation of natural genes available in the populations. the entire collection (of plants/seeds ) having all the diverse alleles for the genes in a given crop is called germplasm collection .
2. Evaluation and Selection of parents: The germplasm is evaluated so as to identify plants with desirable of hybridisation. Purelines are created wherever desirable and possible.
3. Cross hybridisation Among the selected parents: The desired characters have very often to be combined from two different plants (parents ) e.g., high protein quality of one parent may need to be combined with disease resistance from another parent. this is possible by cross hybridising in one plant. this is a very time-consuming and tedious process since the pollen grains from the desirable plant chosen as male parent have to be collected and placed on the stigma of the flowers as female parent. Also, it is not necessary that the hybrids do combine the desirable characters, usually, only one in few hundred to a thousand crosses shows the desirable combination.
4. Selection and testing of superior recombinants: This step consists of selecting among the progeny of the hybrids those plants that have the breeding objective and requires careful scientific evaluation of the progeny. This step yields plants that are superior to both of the parents (very often more than one superior progeny plant may become available) these are self-pollinated for several generations till they reach a state of uniformity (homozygosity ) so that the characters will not segregate in the progeny.
5. Testing Release and commercialisation of new cultivars: The newly selected lines are evaluated for their yield and other agronomic traits of quality, disease resistance etc. this evaluated is done by growing these in the research fields and management all the agroclimatic zones when the crop is usually grown. the material is evaluated in comparison to the best available local crop After evaluation the variety can be relased for the farmers.