Application of genomics in agriculture

The goals of agricultural plant science are to increase crop productivity and the quality of agricultural products and to protect the environment by maintaining a system of sustainable agriculture that preserves the ecological basis of plant production. These goals have significant economic implications, which are affected by environmental conditions. The inherent diversity among plant species demonstrates clearly that plants are able to adapt to environmental stresses using genetically based programs Crop improvement, i.e. the optimisation of plant features and performance according to agricultural needs, has been undertaken for hundred’s of years: agronomists, breeders, and gardeners have used classical plant breeding methods based on selection of natural variants to improve genetic sources. Methods and techniques developed in molecular biology in recent years, especially reliable transformation systems for essentially all crops and growing numbers of complete genome sequences of higher plants, are providing tools to support plant breeding strategies and allowing scientists to tackle as yet unsolved problems or to speed up breeding programmes. Such tools will extend plant breeding by introducing new, unanticipated traits, in order to develop plants in which both crop productivity and stress tolerance are enhanced.