In vitro selection

Natural selection serves the demands of nature and the plant itself resulting, e.g. in fragile ears, long stolons or toxic seeds to secure survival of the species. At this point man has to interact to select the plant that most serves his needs as food, feed or industrial raw material. Consequently this is the central step of the breeding process. Success depends on the ease and speed with which the superior plants within a segregating population can be identified. In classical plant breeding programmes, selection is carried out on huge populations normally in the field. Field selections are strongly influenced, however, by environmental conditions, and are uncertain and lengthy, especially in the case of breeding for quantitative characteristics with a polygenic background. Such traits usually show only slight changes per selection cycle and it may easily take 10–20 years to improve a desired agronomic trait.