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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.