Our industry 2014 - (Page 59)

    Technology in agriculture  04   59   Plant breeding history   Since the practice of agriculture began 10,000 years ago, farmers have   been conducting 'plant breeding'. Initially farmers simply selected food plants  with particular desirable characteristics, and used these as a seed source for   subsequent generations, resulting in an accumulation of characteristics over time.  However, over time experiments began with deliberate hybridization.The science  of plant breeding made huge progress based on the work of Gregor Mendel  toward the end of the 19th century. By the 1920s, the first hybridized crops were introduced, bringing tremendous  yield improvements to some crops. In 1953 Watson and Crick discovered the  structure of DNA. This would soon lead to the advent of marker assisted breeding  and to a revolution in the science of crop improvement. Until the 1980s, breeding science consisted of crossing plants within the same   or related species. But in 1983 the first genetically modified plant was produced,  opening the possibility to improve crops with completely novel characteristics:   biotechnology became an additional technology in the breeder's toolbox. Today  breeding has become an information science utilizing teams of computational  biologists empowered by the processing power of supercomputer and advanced  modeling techniques. You can find more information about some of the modern breeding technologies  mentioned in the following section.   The first hybridized crops  were introduced in the  1920s 

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Our industry 2014

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