About Lesson
- It is useful in improving certain specific characteristics of a well-adapted high yielding variety. This is particularly useful in floricultural crops which are mostly clonally propagated. These crops show highly heterozygous nature and therefore, in such a case, mutagenesis is the only method available to improve the specific characteristics of clones without changing their genetic makeup.
- Inductions of desirable mutant alleles which may not be present in the normal population or germplasm or may be present but may not be available to the breeder due to political or geographical reasons.
- Mutation breeding can also be used on F1 hybrids or progenies resulting from inter-varietal crosses. These may be treated with mutagens in order to increase genetic variability by inducing mutations and to facilitate recombination among linked genes.
- Irradiation of inter-specific (distant) hybrids has been done to produce translocations.
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