Source: Greg Bryan, GENETIC LITERACY PROJECT, 8/10/20


Crop improvement has a history as old as human civilization. At its core is a strategy to pursue greater genetic diversity: conferring plants with new desirable traits or characteristics (which often runs counter to how plants are programmed to be competitive in the wild). The oldest form of crop improvement is plant breeding, where breeders look for desirable qualities (yield, composition, resistance to pests/diseases) in different, but compatible plants of the same species and bring them together.

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