B.Y. Morrison Lecturer: Fulfilling the Promise - Applying Molecular Tools to Horticultural Crops

Objective(s):
Featured Speaker: Michael Reid Molecular strategies provide powerful tools for breeding novel horticultural crops by readily incorporating important phenotypes that improve quality and production traits into existing elite cultivars. Although the 'FlavrSavr' tomato was the first commercial crop to be developed using these new tools, biotechnology has primarily been applied to large-scale agronomic crops. Recent discoveries in plant biology are already driving the laboratory testing of new strategies for modifying the architecture, flowering, longevity, and pest and disease resistance of horticultural plants. Fulfilling the promise of biotechnology requires a concerted effort to remove the financial, regulatory, and intellectual property roadblocks to releasing these plants for commercial production.