TOPICS

1. Plant Genetic Resources and Landraces
Pre-Breeding and Germplasm Characterization

As well known plant genetic resources are base material for plant breeding programs. Landraces, one of these resources, are defined as a variety of domesticated agricultural plant species which has, over a long period of time, adapted to the local natural environment in which it lives. These plants have become nowadays a valuable genetic resource for the use of future generations.
On the other hand, one in the last few years defined term Pre-breeding refers to all activities designed to identify desirable characteristics and/or genes from unadapted materials that cannot be used directly in breeding populations and to transfer these traits to an intermediate set of materials that breeders can use further in producing new varieties for farmers. Pre-breeding is a necessary first step in the use of diversity arising from wild relatives and other unimproved materials.

2. Conventional Plant Breeding
Conventional plant breeding is the improvement of cultivars/genotypes using conservative tools for manipulating the plant genome, of course within the natural genetic boundaries of the investigated species. Conventional Plant Breeding will cover Improvement of Neglected and Nwe Crops, The Development of New Crops, Rootstcok Breeding and Mutation Breeding.

Improvement of Neglected and New Crops
Underutilized, minor, orphan or neglected crops are labels often applied to plant species that are indigenous, rather than non-native or adapted introductions, and which often form a complex part of the culture and diets of the people who grow them.

The development of New Crops
This issue aims to diversify cropping systems to increase agricultural income and profitability, protect water quality through reduced fertilizer use and support production of protein-rich grains for food and feed uses etc.

Rootstock Breeding
We know that rootstock material influences size, productivity, fruit quality, pest resistance, stress tolerance, and ultimately profitability in fruits and vegetables. It also reduces juvenility and vigor and incorporates a much more uniformity and consistency. Further, rootstock selection work offers a powerful tool for the sustainable intensification of production. Besides, adaptation to water deficit and high salinity, tolerance to alkaline soils and susceptibility to pathogens can be influenced by the choice of proper rootstock.

Mutation breeding
Mutation, i.e. the heritable change in the genetic structure of an individual. This results in new traits which are passed on from parent to offspring and the reevolution are forced. Mutation breeding, sometimes referred to as "variation breeding", is the process of can also be defined as exposing seeds to chemicals or radiation in order to generate mutants with desirable traits to be bred with other cultivars. In nature, variation occurs mainly as a result of mutations and without it, plant breeding would be impossible. In this context, the major aim in mutation-based breeding is to develop and improve well-adapted plant varieties by modifying one or two major traits to increase their productivity or quality.

3. Molecular Techniques in Plant Breeding
Plant breeding describes methods for the creation, selection, and fixation of superior plant phenotypes in the development of improved cultivars suited to needs of farmers and consumers. Primary goals of plant breeding with agricultural and horticultural crops have typically aimed at improved yields, nutritional qualities, and other traits of commercial value. Molecular breeding is currently in standard use in many crops.

MPB aims at developing molecular methods and techniques to understand the genetic composition of complex traits and applying this knowledge to plant breeding, supporting the development of new cultivars with novel traits that can contribute to a sustainable agriculture.
Kaynak: https://mpb.ethz.ch

4. Plant Breeding and New Methods in Biotechnology
Biotechnology in its broadest sense refers to the use of living organisms or their components to provide useful products. In fact, agriculture itself can be considered to be the original biological technology. With increasing knowledge of genetics, plant breeders in this century have accelerated the improvement of crops for enhanced yield and quality. New recombinant DNA techniques now allow the specific identification, isolation, and alteration of genes and their reintroduction into living organisms to produce transgenic varieties. These new techniques are supplementing and extending traditional breeding methods to enhance the production of food, fiber, and other agricultural products.

4. Variety Registartion and Seed Sertification System
The purpose of registration of cultivars is to introduce the newly evolved varieties to the public for general cultivation in the region in which it is suitable. It enables the farmers to choose cultivars for cultivation in a region.

Plant genetic resources are the biological basis of food security and, directly or indirectly, support the livelihoods of every person on Earth. Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA) consist of diversity of seeds and planting material of traditional varieties and modern cultivars, crop wild relatives and other wild plant species. These resources are used as food, feed for domestic animals, fibre, clothing, shelter and energy. Seed is one of the most crucial elements in the livelihoods of agricultural communities. It is the repository of the genetic potential of crop species and their varieties resulting from the continuous improvement and selection over time. 

5. Resistance to Biotic and Abiotic Stresses
The resistant genes against biotic stresses present in plant genome are encoded in hundreds. The biotic stress is totally different from abiotic stress, which is imposed on plants by non-living factors such as salinity, sunlight, temperature, cold, floods and drought having negative impact on crop plants

Breeding pest and disease resistance
Development of resistant varieties has been receiving more attention recently than in earlier times. The increase in insect injury that has occurred recently may be due to the more extensive cultivation of crop varieties over wider areas. Although many of the established field crop insects are well known, their prevalence is now felt because of the increased acreage of crops, vegetables, fruits, etc. This has led to a greater interest in developing resistant varieties and this is the best method of insect control in crop plants. Such varieties possess the ability to give a higher yield of good quality than susceptible varieties at the same level of insect population.

Climate Change and Plant Breeding
Climate change is an increasing remarkable issue in the last few decades. Plant breeding stands as an suitable tool for developing new genotypes adaptable to changing weather conditions either locally or globally.

6. Technological Quality and Functional food breeding
A functional food is defined as any food or food ingredient that may provide a health benefit beyond that conferred by the nutrients the food contains. As nutrition scientists move into this arena, they must build on the wealth of information that already exists in plant biology. In particular, the evolutionary and physiologic bases for the production of secondary plant chemicals in plants must be considered in order to plan meaningful experiments for testing the functionality of these chemical compounds for humans. 

Functional Foods are important disease curing and prevention agents in monitoring and management of health systems. The development and innovation of functional foods throughout the world is a new conceptual task due to the growing trade of health foods and consumers also showing interest towards health benefits of functional food/ingredients to keep away maximum of synthetic pharmaceuticals.

7. Phenomics, Remote Sensing and Omics Technologies
Reliable, automatic, multifunctional, and high-throughput phenotypic technologies are increasingly considered important tools for rapid advancement of genetic gain in breeding programs. With the rapid development in high-throughput phenotyping technologies, research in this area is entering a new era called ‘phenomics.’

High-throughput phenotyping, particularly through the application of remote sensing tools, offers a rapid and non-destructive approach to plant screening. Recent advances in remote sensing technologies as well as in data processing has increased applications in both field and controlled growing conditions with important consequences for crop improvement.

Computational and high-throughput methods, such as genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics, known collectively as “-omics,” have been used to study plant biology for well over a decade now. As these technologies mature, plant and crop scientists have started using these methods to improve crop varieties.

8. Tissue Culture and Cryopreservation
Tissue culture, a method of biological research in which fragments of tissue from an plant are transferred to an artificial environment in which they can continue to survive and function. The cultured tissue may consist of a single cell, a population of cells, or a whole or part of an organ.

Cryopreservation is a process that preserves organelles, cells, tissues, or any other biological constructs by cooling the samples to very low temperatures. The responses of living cells to ice formation are of theoretical interest and practical relevance.

Several methods are available to maintain plant tissue cultures. Each method has advantages and disadvantages regarding the labour required, the frequency of necessary transfers, the availability of equipment, the potential for contamination, the risk of somaclonal variation, and the type of tissue to be preserved. 

9. Bioinformatics and Big Data Processing
Sequencing of DNA is an important issue nowadays. Modern technology of sequencing allows one to read the individual genomes in a few days. Advances in modern bioinformatics related to the emergence of high-performance sequencing platforms, which not only contributed to the expansion of the capabilities of biology and related sciences, but also gave rise to the phenomenon of large data. The necessity of development of new technologies and methods for organization of storage, management, analysis and visualization of large data is necessary. Modern bioinformatics has faced not only the problem of enormous volumes of heterogenous data, but also with a huge variety of processing and presentation methods, the existence of various software tools and data formats.

10. New Breeding Methods for Future Challenges
Plant breeding is as well known an ongoing process in improving plants for human and other needs. The fact that challenges will occur in near and coming future presumably will give rise to develop new breeding methods for cover these demands on global or local level.

11. Intellectual Property Rights
Plant breeding is long and expensive biological science but plant varieties can easily be produced, therefore, breeders need protection to recover investment. Plant breeding has conventionally offered challenges for patent safety due to a number of technical and legal factors that include hitches in defining, as well as verifying, whether the breeding of a new plant variety constitutes a new innovation, as well as the fact that plants can self-reproduce. However, there have been arguments for establishing some means to reward the creativity inherent in new crop varieties almost from the beginning of modern plant breeding. Thus, Intellectual property rights (IPRs) came into scene. IPRs can be broadly defined as the legal rights established over creative or inventive ideas.

IPR. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are legal rights that protect creations and/or inventions resulting from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary or artistic fields. The most common IPRs include patents, copyrights, marks and trade secrets.