Q.What is Heterosis?

Heterosis is the superiority of an F1 hybrid over its parents, exploited in plant/animal breeding.

Heterosis, also called hybrid vigour, is the phenomenon observed in plant and animal breeding where crossing two genetically dissimilar (often inbred) parental lines produces an F1 hybrid offspring that is superior to both parents in one or more desirable characteristics — such as higher yield, better growth rate, larger size, or greater disease resistance. This superiority is generally attributed to the increased heterozygosity in the hybrid, masking deleterious recessive alleles and combining favourable dominant alleles from both parents. Heterosis is widely exploited commercially, e.g. in hybrid ma …

Hybridization is the deliberate crossing of genetically different parents to combine desirable traits in their offspring, and is classified as intervarietal, interspecific, or intergeneric depending on how closely related the parents are.

Definition

In plant breeding, hybridization refers to crossing two selected plants having genetically dissimilar traits so that their good characters (e.g. high yield, disease resistance, quality) are combined in the resulting hybrid progeny. The hybrids are then selected and stabilised through further breeding.

Types of hybridization

1. Intervarietal hybridization (intraspecific) — parents are two different varieties/strains of the SAME species.
2. Interspecific hybridization — parents belong to two different species of the SAME genus.
3. Intergeneric hybridization — parents belong to two different genera altogether (relatively rare, harder to achieve due to greater genetic distance).

Significance

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