Criteria for decision making in crop improvement programmes — Technical considerations

Plant breeding involves three stages: namely, creation of variation, selection of desired genotypes and trialling to confirm characteristics. Since the 1900s, plant geneticists and plant breeders have worked together to develop methods to increase the options and efficiencies of the different stages in plant improvement. During the intervening years, inputs from plant pathologists and plant physiologists have been assimilated. Recently, new techniques for plant improvement have been developed by molecular biologists and plant tissue culturists. The challenge is to incorporate these and other non-conventional methods efficiently into the development of strategies for plant improvement.