Perceptions of plant breeding methods – from ‘phenotypic selection’ to ‘genetic modification’ and ‘new breeding technologies’
Plant breeding has been closely aligned with the development of civilisations and continues to be important for the supply of nutritious food and a key factor in reducing poverty and hunger. Plant breeding uses a range of techniques for both expanding and exploiting the genetic potential of plants. However, some techniques are deemed higher risk than others despite the end products of both processes at times being indistinguishable. While it is considered that the domestication of some plant species began over 10,000 years ago, it is only in the last 100 years or so that modern plant breeding has been used to develop thousands of cultivars in a range of plant species for food, feed, and recreation. In the last 25 years, genetic modification and, more recently, New Breeding Technologies have been used to introduce new variations into important plant species. This has resulted in mistrust and suspicion, and a range of regulatory systems. Product-based and process-based regulatory systems differ in the information required for decision-making. Methods used for the development and manipulation of plant traits are reviewed in an attempt to understand the reasons why some are deemed more acceptable than others.
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© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.Publication date
2023-03-22Project number
- Non revenue
Language
- English
Does this contain Māori information or data?
- No