Benefit Your Farm With Plant Breeding Technology – Steps For Disease Resistance

Traditional farming was limited to yielding food for humankind and animals. Better management may increase the yield, but only to some extent. However, the plant breeding increased yield to a large level. Thus, it helps not only to meet the basic requirements of the food, but also provides a way to export it.

Basic steps for developing new varieties of plants

Collecting the Germplasm is the first step of this process. The Germplasm is the total of all alleles of genes that are present in the crop and its relevant species. The complete collection containing all different alleles for all the genes is called germplasm collection. Good germplasm collection is vital to ensure the success of the breeding program.

The second step is to evaluate the germplasm and to identify the plants with required combination of characters. Selection of the parents is done by picking up the ones having desirable traits.

The third step involves Hybridisation. It is the process of crossing two or more kinds of plants in order to bring their traits or characteristics together in progeny.

Making crops disease resistance

The plant nurseries UK ensures that the plants or crops are free from any disease. Crop losses can be over 20-30% if bacterial, fungal, or viral pathogens attacks cultivated crops.

However, food production can be increased greatly if the plants are made disease resistant. Plus, it will also reduce the use of bactericides or fungicides. It is crucial to know causative organism as well as mode of transmission before breeding.

Generally, the disease is developed in plants due to three factors. They are pathogen genotype, host genotype, and environmental factors. Some of the host genotypes have the ability to avoid pathogen strain from generating any kind of disease. Such host lines are known as resistant and this ability is termed as disease resistance. Two main factors decide the successful breeding for the disease resistance. A better source of resistance and a dependable disease test. The disease resistant plants must be produced to prevent any kind of infection.

Thus, experienced plant breeders have made some great scientific strides to enhance the crop production that you grow. Plant breeding delivers higher yielding plant varieties with good agronomic traits that can benefit your farm greatly.