Q.You are a Botanist working in the area of plant breeding. Describe the various steps that you will undertake to release a new variety.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Releasing a new crop variety through conventional plant breeding follows a defined sequence: collect variability, evaluate and select parents, hybridise, select superior recombinants, test them, and multiply/release the resulting variety.
As a Botanist working in plant breeding, developing and releasing a new, improved variety would involve the following systematic steps:
Step 1 — Collection of variability (germplasm collection):
Assemble and preserve, in a germplasm collection, all the different wild species, varieties and cultivars of the crop, since genetic variability is the essential pre-requisite for any breeding programme — it provides the raw material of desirable genes/traits (disease resistance, yield, quality etc.) to work with.
Step 2 — Evaluation and selection of parents:
The germplasm is evaluated to identify plants with desirable combinations of characters (e.g., high yield potential, disease resistance, quality traits). Superior plants are selected as parents for hybridisation.
Step 3 — Cross hybridisation among the selected parents:
The chosen parents (which individually possess one or more desirable traits) are cross-pollinated to combine the desired traits present in two different parents into a single hybrid plant. This is a laborious step requiring precise pollen transfer and confirmation of successful cross-pollination.
Step 4 — Selection and testing of superior recombinants:
Among the progeny (F1, F2 and subsequent generations) of the hybridisation, plants that show the desired character combination are selected, and undergo repeated selfing over several generations to achieve homozygosity (uniform, true-breeding lines) for the desired traits.
Step 5 — Testing the new variety: …
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