Upload Now
The below mentioned article provides notes on traditional plant breeding.
When crossing two plants using traditional breeding techniques, breeders mix thousands of genes in order to transfer the protein products to enhance one or a few genetic traits. Therefore, the odds of something —such as a naturally occurring toxin —being transferred unintentionally are far greater in traditional breeding than in biotechnology.
To avoid toxicity, breeders spend many years back-crossing the new plant varieties with distant relatives. Back-crossing involves crossing new plant varieties repeatedly with plants whose genetic components are well known. This slowly dilutes the impact of all those unwanted genetic traits that came along with the few beneficial traits.
When breeders develop new varieties, they carefully consider two questions:
1. Will they inadvertently increase naturally occurring toxicants while seeking other modifications, such as enhanced protein content?
2. Might they inadvertently create a toxicant in a new plant by crossing two plants known to be safe?
Plant breeding is generally safe, and biotechnology can make it safer. Biotechnology brings to traditional plant breeding the ability to move single genes instead of having to move thousands and makes possible the identification of those genes and their protein products that are toxins.
Rather than spending 10 to 12 years to breed plants in the traditional manner and mixing thousands of genes to improve a crop plant, modern crop breeders can select a specific genetic trait from any plant and move it into the genetic code of another plant through biotechnology.
As the knowledge of biotechnology grows, toxicologists can improve their understanding of how natural and synthetic toxicants actually affect humans and animals at the cellular level.
This means that “high dose” animal tests, in which various substances are fed to research animals in high doses to assess possible human health risk, will be steadily replaced by “low dose” studies in which the effects of tested substances on cultures of animal cells can be studied directly. This also means greater accuracy and utility.