ABSTRACT
Throughout history, plant breeders have sought to genetically modify food crops to improve yield and increase resistance to disease and plant pests. Initially these improvements were achieved by selecting seed from superior plants and reproducing these with continual selection and breeding. Genetic modification of plants has been practiced for hundreds of years with considerable success by plant breeders. Plant breeding has become a very sophisticated branch of applied genetics. Breeders have developed elegant procedures for crossing plants to introduce and maintain desirable traits such as increased yield and resistance to disease. Biotechnological methods do not replace conventional breeding practices but can facilitate the introduction of desirable traits into the plant genome more efficiently and with greater precision. Unlike traditional breeding in which thousands of genes may be introduced into progeny from their parents, only one or a few genes are typically introduced using biotechnological techniques.
