SCOPE AND IMPORTANCE OF PLANT BIOTECHNOLOGY IN CROP IMPROVEMENT

Plant biotechnology involves breeding to improve plants for various reason such as increasing yield and quality, heat and drought resistance, resistance to phytopathogens, herbicide and insect resistance, increasing biomass for biofuel production, and enhancing the nutritional quality of the crops. This chapter presents a brief history of breeding, disadvantages of conventional breeding while advantages of non-conventional breeding techniques such as molecular marker-assisted breeding techniques and molecular farming. Tissue culture, as a form of large-scale plant micropropagation and its advantages along with the future of breeding program based on high throughput sequencing platform called genomic assisted molecular farming have been also discussed.