Brief History and Perspectives on Plant Breeding

Abstract

Following the rediscovery of Mendel’s principles of heredity in 1900, plant breeding has made tremendous progress in developing diverse methodologies to create and select variation by using genetic principles. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, plant breeding has been systematized with state-of-the-art technologies aided by transgenic and genomics approaches. In the future, breeders will be able to assemble desirable alleles or genes into promising varieties with optimized performance using an approach that integrates scientific fields. Recent concerns about global warming, abnormal weather patterns, and unfavorable environments have pushed breeders to speed up the breeding process. In this chapter, the history of plant breeding, methods for creating variation, selection and generation advance strategies, and challenges and perspectives are briefly reviewed and discussed.