Development of herbicide resistant crops through induced mutations

摘要

Herbicide resistance is an innate characteristic of crop plants. It enables them to survive and propagate even in the presence of lethal doses of herbicides in the surroundings. Genetic tolerance in crops towards herbicides may have several benefits. It may increases safety margins between weed and crop sensitivity and also expands applicability of a particular herbicide. Besides, it can also lower the operating cost for weed control as compared to manual weeding and crop rotation which is normally prohibited by herbicide persistence. Herbicide resistant crops are developed through transformation of a plant with either native or mutant resistant genes, seed mutagenesis, plant cell or tissue culture and through other traditional plant breeding techniques. Seed mutagenesis is a non-transgenic approach, which is found to be most economical and perfect approach. Moreover, all commercial herbicide tolerant crops were derived from single nucleotide substitution of genes and trait can be incorporated into elite varieties because of incomplete dominance and non-pleiotropic effect of the alleles of all commercial herbicide tolerant mutations.