Selective breeding

• Selective breeding - process by which selected organisms with desirable characteristics are breed together to produce offspring with that characteristic.
• Selective breeding has to happen over lots of generations, as every generation the ones with the best characteristic is selected and breed together.
• Drawbacks of selective breeding;

  • Reduces the gene pool of the population.
  • Can lead to inbreeding, which makes them more prone to disease and inherited defects.
  • Less variation, meaning if a pathogen infect one plant it will most likely affect all of them, so all crops will be lost.