ABSTRACT
Since the move from hunter-gather to agriculturist from as long as 10,000 years ago, (Diamond 1998) human beings have been intervening in the heredity of plants, animals, and more recently microorganisms. Until the past decade this has involved selective breeding, including use of techniques such as controlled pollination, hybridization, and lately cloning. The genetic makeup of plants has thus undergone changing through breeding for several millennia (Halford and Shewry 2000). Random events such as genetic recombination and transposition of genes can occur spontaneously within plants. Chromosome rearrangements can be produced and mutations induced using chemical and irradiation treatments. Crossspecies hybrids are more the norm than the exception in the botanical world (Royal Society of New Zealand 2000). Interspecies and even intergenera hybrids have been created using cell and tissue culture techniques such as embryo culture and in vitro fertilization (Scott and Conner 1999a,b).
