Plant Breeding and Secondary Metabolite Overviews

Plant breeding is an art of improving economically important plants on a scientific basis. The main purpose of plant breeding is to evolve improved varieties of plants. Its objectives are to improve yield, quality, disease resistance, drought and frost characteristics of the crops. Plant breeding has been crucial in increasing agricultural production. Plant cell cultures are becoming promising potential alternative sources for the production of high-value secondary metabolites of industrial importance. Plants face genetic erosion because of habitat destruction and over exploitation, thus need to be conserved. Plant tissue culture techniques are advantageous over the conventional agricultural practices vis-à-vis the conservation strategies in the plants in question. Plant cells are biosynthetically tot potent, which means that each cell in culture retains complete genetic information and hence is able to produce the range of chemicals found in the parent plant.