How can plantbreeding innovations contribute to making more food en flowers available in a shorter period of time? By increasing the speed of the plant breeding process!!
Plant Breeding is highly specialized craftmanship that requires profound knowledge of a crop species, its growing habits, abiotic and biotic stress symptoms, amongst others, and deep insight into the requirements of the particular crop for future growth and market. Through hybridization and crossing followed by selection new varieties are bred. Plant breeding takes a long time, up to 10-15 years. Luckily there are now new Key Enabling DNA technologies available that can aid the breeder in the selection process and introduction of new traits and thereby can speed up the plantbreeding process. In this presentation a couple of these Key Enabling Technologies will be presented and discussed, like Molecular Markers, CRISPR-cas en Next Generation Sequencing.
With the pressing need for food and flowers that are resilient to climate change, biotic stress and a growing demand for food, the implementation of these new technologies is urgently needed.
Speaker Dr. Nelleke Kreike
Professor of Applied Sciences, Green Biotechnology
University of Applied Sciences, Inholland, Amsterdam