Question

Write down in sequence the main steps of plant breeding. What is its importance?

Answer 1

Hint: Plant breeding is a technique of biotechnology where the traits of plants are changed to produce desired characteristics. It has been applied to upgrade the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals. The main aim of plant breeding is to generate crop varieties that possess unique and superior traits for a variety of agricultural applications.

Complete answer:
Plant breeding is a technique of genetic upliftment of the crop to produce desired plant types that are better suited for cultivation. The first step of plant breeding is the collection of variability. Variability is the base of all breeding processes. The plants or seeds are collected for all possible gene alleles in a given crop. These seeds are called germplasm.
At the next step, the evaluation of the germplasm and selection of parent plants with the desired traits is done. These desired characteristics are expected in the hybrid progeny.
The next level of plant breeding is cross-hybridization among chosen parent plants. At this step develops the pure lines of progeny. This step is a long and time-consuming process where the pollen is introduced from one plant to the stigma of the other. There are only one or two progenies among them that all shows the desired combination of characteristics.
In the fourth step, the generated progenies are tested and then the desired combination of characteristics is self-pollinated and shows homozygosity.
Finally, they are grown in research fields to examine their quality, yield, resistance to diseases, etc. Then these crops are cultivated in farmers' fields at different locations in the country which represent the different agroclimatic zones. After successful cultivation, the crops are marketed commercially for public use.
Plant breeding has major importance in enhancing food production. Disease resistance ability in those plants increased through breeding. Plants produced in plant breeding have a high tolerance to various environmental stresses, such as salinity, extreme temperatures, drought, etc. High yielding with a high nutritional value of crop plants is produced through breeding.

Additional information:
There are various objectives of plant breeding such as increasing the crop yield, raising plants with desired characteristics, developing a disease-resistant crop, and producing plants that can tolerate extreme environmental stress. There are various types of plant breeding : backcrossing, inbreeding, hybrid breeding, mutation breeding, and genetic engineering.

Note: Plant breeding is a practice of biotechnology to change the traits of plants according to the required characteristics. It has been used for the improvement of the quality of nutrition in products for humans and animals. This process is gone through a number of steps. At first, the germplasm is selected then these seeds are taken to cross-hybridization. The produced plants are then tested. This technique has several importance.