To improve forage quality through breeding and genetics, plant geneticists enhance economically important plants by improving nutritional quality, photosynthetic efficiency, and resistance to diseases, herbicides, and environmental stress. This involves techniques like crossbreeding, artificial selection, and genetic engineering to create plants with desirable traits they might not possess naturally, such as the ability to use free nitrogen or resist diseases.
How to Genetically Improve Forage Quality?
Employing Molecular Biology
Molecular biology greatly influences plant genetics and crop production. Genetic engineering has proven to be a useful tool in agricultural science. Genetically modified crops can dramatically increase per-area crop yields and, in some cases, reduce the use of chemical insecticides.
Inducing Gene Changes
Special treatments for inducing gene changes include the application of mutation-inducing chemicals and irradiation with ultraviolet light and X-rays. These treatments commonly induce deleterious genetic changes, but, occasionally, beneficial ones also may occur.
Selecting Disease-Resistant Plants
Several means of obtaining disease-resistant plants are commonly employed alone or in combination. These include introduction from an outside source, selection, and induced variation. Developing disease-resistant plants is a continuing process.
What are the benefits of improving forage through breeding and genetics?
- Increased Yield: Selecting morphological variants, such as dwarf, early-maturing varieties of rice, can increase yield. These varieties are sturdy and allow for additional planting of rice or other crops in the same year.
- Enhanced Nutritional Quality: Breeding can significantly improve the nutritional content of plants. For example, breeding maize varieties with higher lysine content is a major goal in plant breeding, especially in regions where maize is a primary source of this essential amino acid.
- Expanded Production Areas: Plant breeding can extend the area where a crop species can be produced. Developing earlier-maturing varieties has allowed crops like grain sorghum to be grown further north than their original tropical origins.
- Pest Control: Developing varieties resistant to diseases and insects is a practical method of pest control. Resistant varieties stabilize production and ensure steady food supplies.
What are examples of genetic modification?
Some food crops have been engineered to increase their nutritional quality, such as golden rice, which was genetically modified to produce almost 20 times the beta-carotene of previous varieties. Plant geneticists also use special techniques to produce new species, such as hybrid grains (i.e., produced by crossing wheat and rye), and plants resistant to destruction by insect and fungal pests.
What is the role of disease resistance?
Disease-resistant varieties of plants offer an effective, safe, and relatively inexpensive method of control for many crop diseases. Most available commercial varieties of crop plants bear resistance to at least one, and often several, pathogens.
What are the two broad categories of resistance to plant diseases?
The two broad categories of resistance to plant diseases are vertical (specific) and horizontal (nonspecific). A plant variety that exhibits a high degree of resistance to a single race, or strain, of a pathogen is said to be vertically resistant; this ability usually is controlled by one or a few plant genes. Horizontal resistance, on the other hand, protects plant varieties against several strains of a pathogen, although the protection is not as complete. Horizontal resistance is more common and involves many genes.
Improving forage quality through breeding and genetics involves employing molecular biology, inducing gene changes, and selecting disease-resistant plants. This leads to increased yield, enhanced nutritional quality, expanded production areas, and effective pest control.
Want to discover more about the specific genetic techniques used in forage improvement?