Steps And Methods To Prevent Diseases During Breeding Process

Plant breeding can be defined as a genetic improvement of plants to create desired charac-teristics that are well suited for human needs and provides better yield. Many times produc-tion is severely affected by diseases such as fungi, viruses and bacteria. The plant breeding is used to develop crops with resistance to these pathogens.

Let us learn more about various steps which are required for breeding purpose:

• Domestication: This is the initial process of growing plants and managing them un-der human care. This step is aimed to increase the food production.

• Germplasm Collection: Germplasm is a collection of all the genes present in certain crops such as wild species, old varieties and cultivated new improved varieties. This process of collection from different sources is an important step. Genes collected from various sources will be stored at a very low temperature.

• Selection and Evaluation of Parents: Evaluation of germplasm is to identify plants with the desired combination of new characters. The process of picking up seeds of the plants with desired traits for the multiplications purpose is known as the selec-tion of parents.

• Hybridization of Selected Parents: One of the most common methods of creating genetic variations among the different varieties is called cross-hybridization. In this process, two or more of the plants with desired traits are brought together. This pro-cess takes a lot of time as there are different procedures involved such as selection, selfing, emasculation, bagging, and tagging.

• Testing and Release of New Cultivars: The newly selected hybrids are further eval-uated for the yield and other disease resistance traits. The evaluation is done in the research field where they record the performance, irrigation under ideal conditions.

Post evaluation testing is performed in the fields for almost three growing seasons at different climatic zones in the country. On successful completion of the test, crops are compared and seeds for the new variety is multiplied and distributed among the farmers.

There are two types of breeding methods - conventional and mutation breeding. In Conven-tional breeding techniques like selection and hybridization are often constrained due to the availability of limited amount of genes for disease resistance. In contrast, induced mutation often leads to desirable characters, which can be multiplied further or used for future breeding.