THE ROLE OF MODERN PLANT BREEDING TO CONTROL PLANT DISEAS

Abstract

Plant breeding is a technology which deals with genetic improvement of crop plants in relation to their economic use, to improve crops selected for desirable characteristics that can be reproduced to satisfy a variety of needs and overcome a multitude of challenges. The main aim of plant breeding is to improve yields, quality, disease resistance, drought resistance, and other desired agronomic characteristics. Agricultural production is affected by many factors such as pests, disease, and environmental changes. Crop plants are attacked by various diseases and insects resulting in considerable yield loss. Thus, plant breeding for disease resistance is a central focus of plant to produce disease-free plants and improve plants quality, quantity and have been made more productive and safer to grow free from disease. Conventional plant breeding for disease resistance has an important role to produce disease resistance crops up to now. However, the emphasizes is for disease resistance traits which preexist in the genetic potential of the species. Modern breeding for disease resistance enables us to introduce fungicidal, insecticidal, nematocidal or bactericidal coding genes from outside the plant species. Modern plant breeders, in along with plant pathologists, have had notable successes in breeding disease-resistant varieties, thus ensuring the economic production of crops. Recently modern plant breeding methods includes marker assisted breeding, transgenic approach, tissue culture, ribonucleic acid interference, and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats gene editing technology plays a central role to produce disease resistance plants. Therefore, applying modern plant breeding technology will help to develop disease resistant varieties that can minimize crop losses, and it will play a fundamental role in ensuring food security to the ever-increasing human population