Breeding of Fruit and Plantation Crops 2 + 1

Concept of resistance breeding

• Insects are usually specialized in their ability to attack the host or part of the host. An insect is capable of damaging or attacking every species of the host. The plant resistance includes those characters which enable a plant to avoid, tolerate or recover from the attack of insect under conditions that would cause greater injury to other plant of the same species.


• Resistance is heritable characters possessed by the plant which influence the ultimate degree of damage done by the insect. In other words, plant resistance is defined as being the collective heritable character by which a plant species raise in groups or individually may reduce the probability of successful utilization of that plant or a host by an insect species, race, biotype or individuals. The degree of resistance is a relative term which is measured by using susceptible cultivar of same plant species as check.
  


• The degree of resistance among specific host plants may vary between two extremes i.e. immunity and high susceptibility. Any degree of host reaction less than immunity is resistance. In case of abiotic stress, the amino acids or enzymes connected with resistance or tolerance to drought, salinity and other factors will be identified and the plants possessing the desirable traits will be used as donors in breeding programmes.