Breeding And Crop Production

Description

Plant breeding involves a broad range of activities. There are initial steps like pre-breeding, leading to the development of an improved germplasm. These can used either for further breeding at other venues, for screening in national or other programmes, or for direct use. Plant breeding involves primarily tissue culture techniques; such as an elimination of virus, micro propagation regeneration from explants, protoplast fusion, and so on. Others involve molecular biology. Two major areas of plant molecular breeding are analysis of the nucleic acids or proteins in plants or pathogens, and production of transgenic plants. Management and retrieval of this data obtained from nucleic acid or protein analysis, also known as bioinformatics, is another area of significance. Oilseed crops can be considered to be the backbone of agricultural economy of India. The important oilseed crops grown in this country are groundnut, rapeseed and mustard, sesame, linseed, safflower, castor, sunflower and niger. India is the leading producer of rapeseed and mustard in the world. These seeds have multiple uses. The chief states producing them are Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Orissa. This book deals with ground-breaking methods for breeding new varieties of major crops with resistance to environmental stresses, that otherwise limit crop production worldwide.