Lecture

2. Historical Development of Plant Breeding

I. Introduction
• Selection based solely on the intuition, skill, and judgment
• Selection began when man chose certain plants for cultivation about 10-
15,000 years ago
• Domestication is the process of bringing a wild species under human
management
o Wheat – the seed bearing spikes of the primitive wheats were brittle
and easily broken apart, causing seeds to shatter and fall to the soil
surface as they ripen.
o Corn – prehistoric corn had small and flinty kernels; early corn was in
the form of podcorn
o Potato – tubers of wild potato often contained alkaloids that made them
bitter to the taste and somewhat toxic if eaten

II. Plant breeding before Mendel
• 650 A.D. -hand pollination of date palm
-rice improvement in China
• 1694 -R.J. Camerarius proved pollen necessary for fertilization
-worked on mulberry and corn
• 1715 -Thomas Fairchild announced production of first artificial plant
hybrid
• 1716 -Kenneth Mather (USA) observed natural cross pollination in corn.
Noted xenia effect
• In 1856, a Frenchman, Louis Leveque de Vilmorin, utilized the progeny test
to increase the sugar content in the wild sugarbeet
• Prof. Hjalmar Nilsson demonstrated that the plant is the correct unit for
selection, not a single flowering structure on the plant as was advocated by
some breeders in that period
o confirmed by Wilhelm Johannsen and W.M. Hayes
• Pioneering experiments in breeding for disease resistance were reported by
W.A. Orton in 1898 (wilt resistance in cotton) and by H.L. Bolley in (wilt
resistance in flax)
• 1838 - M.J. Schleiden and T. Schwann
o cell theory – all animal and plant organisms are composed of
cells
• 1856 - L. de Vilmorin gave special attention to the value of progeny test
o used in US in 1888 by W.M. Hays
• 1857 - Charles Darwin
o came out with the theory of “Origin of Species” that natural
selection is the mechanism of evolution
• 1866 - Gregor Johann Mendel's experiment in plant hybridization
o principles of unit factors, segregation, recombination, dominance
o laid foundations of modern genetics
 • 1900's - Rediscovery and elucidation of Mendel's laws
o De Vries (Holland)
o Correns (Germany)
o Tachermark (Austria)

III. Plant breeding after Mendel
• Heterosis and hybrid breeding
o observed increased growth when unrelated plants of the same
species are crossed
o G. H. Shull (1909) – pioneered the development of hybrid corn;
coined “heterosis” or “hybrid vigor”
• Quantitative genetics- study of genetic control of traits which show
continuous variation
o Fisher (1918) successfully applied Mendelian principles to
explain genetic control of traits with continuous variation
o He divided the genotypic variance into additive, dominance and
epistatic variances.
• Genotype-by-environment interaction(GXE)
o First recognized by Mooers (1921) and Yates and Cochran (1938)
o Various statistical methods have been developed (combined
ANOVA, clustering, pattern analysis, etc.)
• Germplasm
o Sir Otto Frankel coined the term ‘genetic resources’ in 1967 to
highlight the relevance and need to consider germplasm as a
natural resource for long term improvement of crop plants
o International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) in 1974
later renamed as International Plant Genetic Resources Institute
(IPGRI) and now as Bioversity International to collect, evaluate
and conserve plant germplasm for future use
o Norman Borlaug- initiated the Green Revolution with his works
on short-statured wheat; he was awarded the 1970 Nobel peace
prize
• Tissue culture and somaclonal variation
o Due to discovery of auxins and cytokinins by Skoog et al led to in
vitro culture of plant tissues(White, 1934)
o Larkin and Scowcroft (1981) coined the term somaclonal
variation to describe the observed variation among plants
regenerated from tissue culture

IV. Plant breeding in the Philippines
• 1909-World War I
o Rice and corn varietal improvement started in 1914
o Followed by other crops
• 1945-1974
o Plant breeding division created in 1945 under the Dept. of Agronomy
 o Breeding works expanded to include more crops
• 1975-present
o Institute of Plant Breeding was established June 5, 1975 under PD 729
o National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory was established two
years later within IPB (PD1046-A)
o Seed Industry Development Act of 1992 (RA 7308) IPB was identified
as lead agency for crop biotechnology research

V. Modern (Molecular) plant breeding
• Genetic engineering and gene transfer
o The discovery of structure of DNA by Watson and Crick (1956) –
enhanced traditional breeding
o Facilitated by enzymes that cut and rejoin DNA molecules
o 1973 - Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer spliced the gene from one
organism into the DNA of another to produce recombinant DNA which
was then expressed normally
• DNA Markers
o Various types of molecular markers identified and developed in the
1980s and 1990s ex. RFLP, RAPD, microsatellites, and SNP
o Their abundance and importance in the plant genome, molecular
markers used in the fields of germplasm evaluation, genetic mapping,
map-based gene discovery and marker-assisted plant breeding
o with the complete sequencing of Arabidopsis genome in 2000, rice
genome in 2002 and other crops and developments in bioinformatics
and genomics ---exciting times to be plant breeders
• Molecular breeding tools: Omics and Arrays
o Genomics
o Transcriptomics
o Proteomics
o Metabolomics
o Phenomics

VI. Others
• Evolution of plant breeding
• Enhancement of compositional traits
• Crop adaptation
• The Green Revolution
o Strategies employed in the Green Revolution
i. Plant improvement
ii. Complementary agronomic package
iii. Favorable returns on investment in technology
o Impacts of Green Revolution
• World production of cereals increased by 2.53 times during 1961-
2006 (FAO, 2007)
 • Cereal production in developing countries has increased 2.7 times,
compared to 2.3 times in developed countries
• The irrigated land area was 139 million ha in 1961, which
increased to 210 million ha in 1980 and to 271 million ha in 2000
• Worldwide fertilizer usage increased from 31 million tonnes in
1961 to 117 million tonnes in 1980 and to 137 million tonnes in
2000 (FAO, 2007)
o Criticisms
• Started an era of chemical farming
• Some argue that the high input agriculture methodology triggered
problems such as soil degradation, soil salinity, chemical pollution
and differential socioeconomic impacts leading to instability
• Only the big farmers could access the costly technology introduced
in the developing countries, while the smaller farmers suffered and
their economic condition further deteriorated and this widened the
economic gap
• New roles of plant breeding
1. Using plants as bioreactors to produce pharmaceuticals-plants to
generate pharmaceutical antibodies, engineering antibody-
pathogen mediated resistance and altering plant phenotypes by
immunomodulation
2. New tools for plant breeding
• New marker technologies continue to be developed
3. Training in plant breeding
• Decline in graduates combine skills of conventional and
molecular technologies
4. Key players in plant breeding industry
• multinationals-mergers
5. Yield gains in crops (HYVs)
6. Biotechnology debate
• Modern technologies benefit developing countries
• IP covering technologies owned by giant multinational
corporations