Transgenics for New Plant Products, Applications to Tropical Crops

Abstract

Advancements in plant science and agricultural technology now allow the direct transfer of gene(s) from diverse origins into target crops for improvement, with the advantages of breaking cross-species barriers and saving time in comparison to conventional breeding and selection. Transgenic technology has been used and commercialized since 1994 to produce new crop products with herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, virus resistance, and improved post-harvest quality. These input traits are characteristic of first generation transgenic crops that continue to be widely adopted by farmers globally. Numerous transgenic crop new products, with increased emphasis on output traits such as improved and novel product quality (which are more appealing and directly beneficial to the consumers), are under development and field testing. Activities in developing crops with new and better agronomic properties and using plants as bioreactors to produce high value products are also on the rise. While tropical plant germplasm, with its rich biodiversity increasingly revealed through gene discovery through genomics and associated technologies, can offer novel genes and regulatory mechanisms for crop improvement, transgenic technology provides a complementary approach with new possibilities for improving tropical crops to assure food security and nutritional well-being of the people in the tropics.