Biotechnology of Floriculture Crops — Scientific Questions and Real World Answers

The floriculture crop industry is technically diverse and is characterized by the use of hundreds of different plant species. Due to the large amount of genetic diversity used by this industry, there are often very complex issues that arise during crop production and during postharvest handling throughout the wholesale and retail markets. Crop production practices are often very complex, and may be complicated by the demands for precise crop timing, and the different cultural requirements of different cultivars. After the crops is produced, optimal conditions for postharvest shipping and handling are difficult to maintain, and this can lead to subsequent poor quality once the crop has arrived at the retail market. In addition to the demands of complex production and marketing systems, the demand from consumers for a constant supply of new and interesting flowering plants with unique characteristics continues to increase. Needs for product quality and availability and subsequent garden performance have driven the availability of new flowering crops to unprecedented levels over the last 5–10 years. With such a vast array of issues in floriculture crops, there is a great deal of potential for using some of these crops as model systems to study the potential for use of transgenic plants with improved horticultural characteristics. In many cases, biotechnology applications are proving to be very difficult, but there have been several advances made with engineering a wide variety of genetic traits in floriculture crops. There have also been significant gains made in cloning important genes that are proving to be involved with biological processes that scientists hope to manipulate in ornamental crops in the future.