Conventional Plant Breeding Methods

Conventional plant breeding methods — those developed and refined over decades before the arrival of modern biotechnology — have had an enormous impact on agricultural productivity, mainly through the hybrid varieties they produced. These methods work by selecting for and combining genetic material that is already present within a species, rather than introducing entirely new genes from outside it. This part of the chapter covers the principal conventional approaches used to breed improved crop varieties: plant introduction, selection, hybridisation, heterosis, mutation breedi …