06-08-2013, 04:52 PM
Efficacy of Biotechnology for the Genetic Improvement of Food Crops
ABSTRACT
Plant biotechnology will facilitate the farming of crops with multiple durable resistance to pests and diseases, particularly in the absence of pesticides. Likewise, transgenes or marker-assisted selection may assist in the development of high yielding crops, which will be needed to feed the world and save land for the conservation of plant biodiversity in natural habitats. Hence, crops should be engineered to meet the demands and needs of consumers. The genetic base of crop production can be preserved and widened by an integration of biotechnology tools in conventional breeding. Similarly targeting specific genotypes to particular cropping systems may be facilitated by understanding specific gene-by-environment interaction(s) with the aid of molecular research. High quality crops with improved nutritional and health characteristics as well as other aspects of added-value may be obtained through multidisciplinary co-operation among plant breeders, biotechnologists, and other plant scientists. Coordinated efforts between consumers, policy makers, farmers and researchers will be required to convert the various aspects of a crop into components of new and improved farming systems of the next millennium. Since Mendel’s work on peas, there have been five eras in genetic marker evolution: morphology and cytology in early genetics (until late 1950s), protein and allozyme electrophoresis in the pre-recombinant DNA time (1960 - mid1970s), RFLP and minisatellites in the pre-PCR age (mid 1970s - 1985), random amplified polymorphic DNA, microsatellites, expressed sequence tags, sequence tagged sites, and amplified fragment length polymorphism in the oligoscene period (1986 - 1995), and complete DNA sequences with known or unknown function as well as complete protein catalogs in the current computer robotic cyber genetics generation (1996 onwards).The driving force for such a development has been the scientific interest of human beings to understand and manipulate the inheritance of their own characters. Plant biotechnology will play, of course, an important role in achieving research and development success in these areas. The general public should see biotechnology as a safe tool for scientific crop improvement, because it helps in the fight against hunger and poverty. Therefore, research funding should be allocated accordingly to long-term plant breeding programmes, which include biotechnology as one of its tools. In this way, we may effectively face the serious challenge of feeding the rapidly growing world population in the next millennium.