Breeding of Vegetable, Spice and Tuber crops (2+1)

Biotechnology

• Biotechnology is a rapidly developing area of contemporary science.
• It can bring new ideas, improved tools and novel approaches to the solution of some persistent, seemingly intractable problems in food crop production.
• Given the pressing need to enhance and stabilize food production in response to mounting population pressures and increasing poverty, there is an urgent need to explore novel terminologies that will break traditional barriers.
• Biotechnology is usually defined as “any technique that uses living organisms, or substances from those organisms, to make or modify a product, to improve plants or animals, or to develop microorganisms for specific uses".
• It is comprised of a continuum of terminologies, ranging from traditional biotechnology such as plant tissue culture to modern biotechnology such as genetic engineering of plants and animals and represents the latest front in the ongoing scientific progress of this century.
• However, its increasing importance, at least in plant improvement, should not obscure the fact that traditional plant breeding, based on hybridization followed by selection and evaluation of a large population in the field, accounts for over 50% of the global increase in agricultural productivity.
• Not only have particularly important new genotypes been bred in Asia through the so-called Green Revolution but also, worldwide, new varieties have been bred in response to the changing needs of agriculture