The Role of Biotechnology in Seed Production:

  For centuries farmers across the globe have been experimenting with plants by using conventional plant breeding techniques to obtain better quality of seeds and hence better yield. With the understanding of the biology behind trait inheritance this process became more scientific and the advancement of biotechnology in the past two decades has revolutionized the same to produce high quality seeds.

   Biotechnology in simple terms is the science of engineering the genetic make up of any organism to achieve desired traits in the organism. The basis of improved seed production can depend broadly on factors like new or improved traits, resistance to disease, stress tolerance, etc. To achieve any these goals biotechnology offers various techniques that can be classified under the following:

• Tissue Culture
• Genetic Engineering

     Tissue culture is an in-vitro aseptic technique for growing and multiplying plant tissues in a controlled environment. Plant breeders produce the F1 hybrids which are heterotrophic. But further to maintain a uniform genotype, self pollination of the seed producing plant should be prevented. Micro propagation of these F1 hybrids eliminates the need for manual emasculation for sterility or pollination and enables rapid multiplication. For example, in the case of hybrid tomatoes, Murashige and Skoog medium (MS) was used to propagate the shoot tip of the F1 hybrid. The parent ex-plants and the auxiliary buds grown are sub-cultured on the same media each giving rise to seedlings ready for transplantation. The results achieved by this method were highly efficient as the pro-genies contained all heterogeneous traits of the hybrid explants. The uniformity of the genotype was also not compromised. Production of hybrid seeds by using this technique had reduced the time period of multiplication by three folds. This method is cost effective, less labor intensive, and rapid.

    Similarly micro-propagation can also be used for maintaining cell lines of male sterility of dominant and recessive genes and self-incompatible cell lines. Self incompatibility is crucial in preventing self pollination. Another tissue culture technique used for the development of self incompatible cell lines is anther culture.

    Anther culture:Self incompatible lines are developed by culturing the microspores of the F1 hybrid which produce haploid seedlings. Chromosome doubling of the haploid F1 hybrid results in true breeding homozygous lines. This technique is mainly used for vegetative plants like tubers and Cole crop.

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