Diversifying Selection in Plant Breeding 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Essay Diversifying Selection in Plant Breeding Susan McCouch “Some qualities nature carefully ?xes and transmits, but some, and those the ?ner, she exhales with the breath of the individual as too costly to perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become ?xed and permanent in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until at last nature adopts them and bakes them into her porcelain”—Ralph Waldo Emerson architecture of the ancestral species through the process of hybridization and selection as originally described by Charles Darwin (1859). The job of the plant breeder is to create an improved variety. This may be accomplished simply by selecting a superior individual from among a range of existing possibilities, or it may require that a breeder know how to ef?ciently swap or replace parts, recombine components, and rebuild a biological system that will be capable of growing vigorously and productively in the context of an agricultural environment. How the breeding is done and what goals are achieved is largely a matter of biological feasibility, consumer demand, and production economics. What is clear is that the surest way to succeed in a reasonable amount of time is to have access to a large and diverse pool of genetic variation. Despite the low yields and poor eating quality of most wild ancestors and primitive crop varieties, these ancient sources of genetic variation continue to provide the basic building blocks from which all modern varieties are constructed. Breeders have T he history of domesticated plant form and function evolves along a two-tiered track that doubles discovered that genes hidden in these low-yielding ancestors can enhance the performance of some of the world’s most productive crop varieties. In this essay, I will provide some historical context for the paper by Gur and Zamir in this issue of PLoS Biology (Gur and Zamir 2004). I will discuss how “smart breeding” recycles “o