Hybrid Plants
Mankind has selectively bred plants for thousands of years with the aim of improving their quality and production. Experimenting with cereal crops, breeders have aimed to enhance their yield of grain, the quality of their flour, and their resistance to disease and drought. With other plants, breeders have tried to improve the perfume and color of the flowers. Others have bread plants for the sole purpose of finding medicines and anti-carcinogens. This advance in technology is great for many reasons, but we must not ignore the dangers of it either. The definition of a hybrid plant, according to Webster's Online is, "anything of mixed origin", the more accurate definition they include is, "the offspring of two animals or plants of different species..." (Mayr 1) Hybrid plants are very dangerous for the business and economy of our country and they pose a risk to our overall ecosystem that we all live in. The improvement of plants, particularly food crops, is obviously important and genetics has contributed to a better understanding of the benefits and disadvantages of particular breeding programs. Many cereal crops such as corn are now planted largely as hybrid seed, produced by out breeding b
etween different inbred varieties. The vigor of the hybrid plant is probably a major contribution to the increased corn output in the United States. This increased output represents a major achievement for applied genetics. In 1929 practically no hybrid corn was grown among the 100 million acres of corn in the United States. But by 1970 the vast majority of 67 million acres was planted with the hybrid variety, yielding twice as much corn. (Tecomate 1) The only problem with this is that with uniformity and non-diversity, comes shared genes in all of the plants. This makes the plants extremely susceptible to disease. The same reasons are why it is physically dangerous for inbreeding most animals. (Pollock 2) They are more at risk to get certain diseases, such as cancer and birth defects. Also in 1970, the United States had one of its worst corn epidemics in history. Because the majority of our corn was of the same hybrid gene makeup, a certain disease known as Helminthosporium maydis wreaked havoc, destroying over twenty percent of the crop, in the United States. (McLean 1) This also had an effect on the stock market, because our nation's stocks are always related to how our agriculture sector is doing. As you can see, hybrid plants have the potential to cause deeply effecting problems on our nation. Breeders do not have to rely on accidents. They can attempt to produce fertile polyploids by crossbreeding between different species. One early attempt to produce another hybrid species was made in 1927 by the Russian geneticist G. D. Karpechenko, who crossbred two quite distantly related species, a radish and a cabbage. Each species has eighteen chromosomes (nine pairs); the hybrids had the same number (nine radish chromosomes and nine cabbage chromosomes) and were sterile. Ho
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1214
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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