Plant Breeding: Theory and Methods

Plant breeding refers to the science of modifying the traits of plants to generate desired qualities. It has been utilized to improve the quality of nutrition in the food products for animals and humans. Plant breeding aims to create crop varieties with superior and unique features that can be used for a range of agricultural purposes. The most commonly studied traits are those associated with end-use quality attributes such as flavor or concentrations of certain biological molecules, biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, processing ease, and biomass or grain production. The type of quantitative or qualitative traits a plant will have is determined by its genes. Plant breeding can be done in a variety of ways, such as selecting plants with desirable features for propagation and using approaches that rely on the knowledge of genetics. This book presents the complex subject of plant breeding in the most comprehensible and easy to understand language. The readers would gain knowledge that would broaden their perspective about the theories and methods of plant breeding.