Selection- A simple and popular method in crop improvement Program

• Plant breeding is a prominent technology to produce superior quality of plant That is able to grow in specific sets of climatic conditions.

Selection :

• It is the one of the method involved in the crop improvement program. 

• Selection is the method to select the plant with desirable characters and eliminate the plants with undesirable characters.

• Due to the effort of humans to select the plant, now almost all crops are improving.

Read more about the Hybridisation: A method of crop improvement

• Generally almost all crops are different from their wild varieties.

• The selection continues from generation to generation during which various characters were lost whereas various characters became stable. There are mainly three kinds of selection.

Mass selection

• It is the oldest and simplest method of selection.

• It is easily adopted by the traditional farmers who want to raise the quality of their crops without any knowledge of plant breeding technique.

• It is the selection of number of plants or seeds with superior characters from the population and harvesting for the production of desired seed in a bulk for the next year crop.

• The mass selection totally depends on external characteristics (phenotypic ) of plants .

• If mass selection has more variability then it leads to more selection of plants. Mass selection can be used in any crop that has heterozygosity.

Read more about the Mutation breeding in crop improvement

• Mass selection is applicable for cross pollinated crops but it is negligible for self pollinated crops due to less heterozygosity.

Pure line selection

• It is the method developed by W. L. Johanseen to produce pure line seed or plant by crossing between two homozygous (similar characters) plants.

• In these methods, a large number of plants are selected and allowed to grow in the field.

• Out of these, the best progeny are stored as the new variety. These varieties are genetically pure and durable.

Clonal selection

• It is generally used in vegetatively propagated plants like sugarcane, Banana Potato etc .

• A plant that is produced vegetatively, is referred as clone because it is genetically and morphologically similar.

Read more about the Production of Triticale by Polyploidy breeding

• The methods of developing varieties from a single clone is called clonal selection.

• In this selection, superior clones are also selected on the basis of phenotypic characters .

• The best clone are multiplied vegetatively and cultivated continuously up to three years.