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Plant Biotechnology and Agriculture

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Basic and Applied Aspects of Biotechnology

Abstract

Agricultural biotechnology is the term used in crop and livestock improvement through biotechnology tools. Biotechnology encompasses a number of tools and elements of conventional breeding techniques, bioinformatics, microbiology, molecular genetics, biochemistry, plant physiology, and molecular biology. The biotechnological tools that are important for agricultural biotechnology include conventional plant breeding, tissue culture and micropropagation, molecular breeding or marker-assisted selection, and genetic engineering and GM crops. In this chapter, readers would learn about the role of biotechnology in crop improvement and the major applications of the field.

Biotechnology has given a new dimension to scientific innovations, offering efficient and cost-effective means to produce a diverse array of novel, value-added products and tools. The present and future focus is on continuing improvement of agronomic traits such as yield and abiotic stress resistance in addition to the biotic stress tolerance of the present generation, crop plants as biomass feedstocks for biofuels and “biosynthetics,” value-added output traits such as improved nutrition and food functionality, and plants as production factories for therapeutics and industrial products. From a consumer perspective, the focus on value-added traits, especially improved nutrition, is of greatest interest. Both traditional plant breeding and biotechnology-based techniques are needed to produce plants with the desired quality traits. Continuing improvements in molecular and genomic technologies are contributing to the acceleration of product development.

With almost 870 million people estimated to suffer from chronic hunger worldwide, undernourishment represents a major problem that severely affects people in developing countries. In addition to undernourishment, micronutrient deficiency alone can be a cause of serious illness and death. Large portions of the world population rely on a single, starch-rich crop as their primary energy source, and these staple crops are generally not rich sources of micronutrients. As a result, physical and mental health problems related to micronutrient deficiencies are estimated to affect around two billion people worldwide. The situation is expected to get worse in parallel with the expanding world population. Improving the nutritional quality of staple crops seems to be an effective and straightforward solution to the problem. Conventional breeding has long been employed for this purpose, but success has been limited to the existing diversity in the gene pool. However, biotechnology enables addition or improvement of any nutrient, even those that are scarce or totally absent in a crop species. In addition, biotechnology introduces speed to the biofortification process compared to conventional breeding. Genetic engineering was successfully employed to improve a wide variety of nutritional traits over the last decade.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biosciences and Biotechnology, Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University, Kanpur, UP, India

    Varsha Gupta

  2. George Washington University, Washington DC, USA

    Manjistha Sengupta

  3. Orthopaedics Unit, Community Health Centre, Kanpur, UP, India

    Jaya Prakash

  4. School of Life sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Baishnab Charan Tripathy

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  1. Varsha Gupta
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  2. Manjistha Sengupta
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  3. Jaya Prakash
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  4. Baishnab Charan Tripathy
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Gupta, V., Sengupta, M., Prakash, J., Tripathy, B.C. (2017). Plant Biotechnology and Agriculture. In: Basic and Applied Aspects of Biotechnology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0875-7_20

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