Hybrid Plants essays

Hybrid Plants essays Mankind has selectively bred plants for thousands of years with the aim of improving their quality and production. Experimenting with cereal crops, breeders have aimed to enhance their yield of grain, the quality of their flour, and their resistance to disease and drought. With other plants, breeders have tried to improve the perfume and color of the flowers. Others have bread plants for the sole purpose of finding medicines and anti-carcinogens. This advance in technology is great for many reasons, but we must not ignore the dangers of it either. The definition of a hybrid plant, according to Webster's Online is, "anything of mixed origin", the more accurate definition they include is, "the offspring of two animals or plants of different species... (Mayr 1) Hybrid plants are very dangerous for the business and economy of our country and they pose a risk to our overall ecosystem that we all live in. The improvement of plants, particularly food crops, is obviously important and genetics has contributed to a better understanding of the benefits and disadvantages of particular breeding programs. Many cereal crops such as corn are now planted largely as hybrid seed, produced by out breeding between different inbred varieties. The vigor of the hybrid plant is probably a major contribution to the increased corn output in the United States. This increased output represents a major achievement for applied genetics. In 1929 practically no hybrid corn was grown among the 100 million acres of corn in the United States. But by 1970 the vast majority of 67 million acres was planted with the hybrid variety, yielding twice as much corn. (Tecomate 1) The only problem with this is that with uniformity and non-diversity, comes shared genes in all of the plants. This makes the plants extremely susceptible to disease. The same reasons are why it is physically dangerous for inbreeding mos t animals. (Pollock 2) They are more at r...