Selective Breeding
Selective Breeding
Selective Breeding
SELECTIVE BREEDING
WHAT IS SELECTIVE BREEDING ?
• Selective breeding involves choosing parents with particular characteristics to breed together and
produce offspring with more desirable characteristics.
• Humans have selectively bred plants and animals for thousands of years including:
• crop plants with better yields
• ornamental plants with particular flower shapes and colours
An organism’s characteristics are partly determined by the combination of gene variants? That are passed on
from one generation to the next. For example, the children of tall parents may themselves be tall if they
inherit a combination of ‘tall’ gene variants.
We can take advantage of this to selectively breed animals or plants, choosing parents with particular
characteristics to produce offspring that have those characteristics.
For example, if we breed tall parents together and exclude shorter parents, the offspring should inherit “tall”
gene variants that make them tall.
• Some of the offspring may even be taller than both of their parents, because they may inherit a
combination of different “tall” gene variants from each parent and together these make the offspring taller.
TYPES OF SELECTIVE BREEDING
• Inbreeding: When the animals bred are very close relatives, such as siblings. Examples of purebred
animals are Labrador Retriever dogs and Siamese cats.
• Linebreeding: It involves breeding together more distant relatives, such as cousins.
• Self-pollination: Plant breeders can use self-pollination as a type of inbreeding, creating plants that are
genetically more identical and that produce identical offspring after many generations.
• Crossbreeding: It involves breeding two unrelated individuals. This is often used to produce offspring
with desirable characteristics from two different individuals. For example, Poodles are crossed with
Labrador Retrievers to combine a Poodle’s low-shedding coat with the Labrador’s calm, trainable
temperament. The resulting ‘Labradoodle’ is a guide dog suitable for people with allergies.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF SELECTIVE
BREEDING
• Advantages:
• Anyone can work on selective breeding.
• Disadvantages :