“Smart breeding” – Clever breeding of today for healthy varieties and food of tomorrow

W. Friedt, Gießen

“Smart breeding”, sometimes also called “clever breeding” or “precision breeding”, stands for methodical alternatives to genetic engineering in modern plant breeding. Classical methods – such as crossbreeding of different parent varieties and subsequent selection of progeny – are combined with novel molecular-biological approaches.

Smart breeding uses molecular-biological methods to characterize initial plants with desirable breeding properties. Methods of vegetable tissue culturing and subsequent regeneration of intact plants essentially reduce the steps among classical crossbreeding, selection of desirable breeding results and subsequent propagation. The breeding targets, such as e.g. resistance to diseases and pest infestation, stress tolerance (e.g. against dryness, salt, heat) or changed components (e.g. fatty acid pattern) are lastly achieved by means of classical breeding, i.e. by combination of suitable parent varieties, thus leading to useful, not genetically engineered plants.

Keywords: genetic engineering, genetically changed organism, marker genes, plant breeding, smart breeding, transgenetic plants

Sie finden den Artikel in deutscher Sprache in Ernährungs-Umschau 03/07 ab Seite 108.