Sections:

Introduction

Early plant breeding

Early plant breeding, wheat example

Development of landraces

History of early wheat varieties in England

Hand pollination

Deliberate use of crossing to generate variation

Principles of inheritance

Genotypic variation

Other forms of heritable variation

Quantitative variation and heritability

Novel sources of genetic variation

The practice of plant breeding

Breeding methods

Plant Breeders' rights

New technologies for plant breeding

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Early plant breeding

Lots of plant improvement happened long before Mendel
Early gatherers probably identified the most productive individuals (eg fruit trees)
The key process was domestication. This gave the opportunity for people to realize that selecting which seeds to sow would determine the type of plants that would grow
Movement of humans to new environments will have forced farmers to select for adaptation to new environments.