Breeding and Germplasm Preservation

Abstract

With the increasing demand for plant based products, cultivation of medicinal and aromatic plants becomes more and more important. Breeding is one of the key technologies for the progress of the supply of high quality medicinal and aromatic plants. To react more rapidly to the requirements of the stakeholders, further improvement of breeding efficiency requires an intensification of (1) the characterisation of individual plants from accessions and conservation of well-defined genotypes, (2) the co-operation between genetic resource experts and breeders to use efficiently the available genetic potential, (3) the investigation on the reproduction biology of traditional and new medicinal plants to choose appropriate breeding strategies, (4) the exploration of molecular markers of important traits and (5) the development of tools to accelerate the breeding procedure.