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- Title
THE FUTURE OF CROP BREEDING FOR NUTRITIONAL QUALITY.
- Authors
RABOY, VICTOR
- Abstract
Looking forward to the not too distant future, breeding programs aimed at enhancing the nutritional quality and health-beneficial properties of staple food and feed crops may be central to and even critical to the sustainability of agriculture and food security world-wide. Developing more nutritious crops seems like an obviously good thing to do, however there are few cases of success, defined here as large-scale production and consumption of staple foods by populations. While there are exceptions, historically the emphasis in plant breeding has been on plant performance, disease resistance and ultimately yield. Nutritional quality and yield are often negatively correlated. Most traits that result in enhanced nutritional quality also result in reduced seed or plant performance ultimately leading to reduced yields. Will the negative relationship between nutritional quality and yield always be the case? Perhaps advances in plant genetics and molecular biology in general and new technologies like genetic engineering will together provide a way to develop more nutritious staple food crops that retain high yields. There is also the real possibility that new knowledge of how the plant genome works will make breeding for nutritional quality more practical. Recent progress indicates that selection for favorable epigenetic states plays a much greater role in achieving gain due to selection than previously understood. What is important is that this success might prove essential in a near-future world where the human population continues to grows towards nine billion and beyond, with diminishing resources for agricultural production. In this context "doing more with less" may prove critically important. More nutritious food is a more efficient food.
- Subjects
PLANT breeding; CROP quality; SUSTAINABLE agriculture; CROP yields; DISEASE resistance of plants
- Publication
SABRAO Journal of Breeding & Genetics, 2013, Vol 45, Issue 1, p100
- ISSN
1029-7073
- Publication type
Article