To meet the needs of growing population, scientists are on the way to introduce new crop/plant varieties. The indigenous species are going to disappear. But we have a new high yielding variety. It is genetic enhancement or genetic erosion?
Why we need to keep the old less productive variety?
If we do not conserve genetic resources when issues attack our crops with their limited variability at some point there may be not way to identify alternative genetic resources to resolve the issues.
The resolution for this issue is to maintain arks of genetic diversity in seed collections which can be used for being tapped in times of emergency.
Another approach would be reservoirs for major crops where unimproved primitive crop primitives could be maintained under a more natural condition.
In the great southern corn leaf blight epidemic the massive epidemic of Helminthospoirum Bipolaris maydis was found with the use of texas cms cytoplasm used to eliminate mechanical detasseling for propagating maize hybrids as the collections of maize lines and populations can be used to identify the genetic solutions to problems that occur. There is vulnerability in our present system which we use we need to either develop more preventive systems with broader genetics which might sufficient uniformity and yield or/and use our collection genetic resources to rapidly identify and reconstruct the genetic combinations which have the ability to withstand the field challenges. These resources need to situated in both public and private resources and have the ability to be shared for humanity needs.
Nafees Mohammad @ in simple words, the genetic erosion means loss of diversity especially the wild types, landraces and unregistered/unimproved types of a specie due to directed selection and introduction of hybrid cultivars.
in other words we can explain genetic erosion as increasing of the frequency of favourable alleles while removing the unwanted alleles form the population permanently. this can make the population vulnerable to disease breakthrough and epidemics.
examples are available from the past especially in the hybrids where complete losses occurred to the crops.
Genetic erosion is the disappearance of genes/alleles from gene pool and reduction in the genetic resources of the earth. Twentieth century has witnessed a loss of 75 per cent of genetic diversity of crop plants. Genetic erosion occurs due to crop number and crop varieties. Originally a large number of plants were utilized for different uses but gradually the number of exploitable plants has decreased. For example, out of 3,000 food plant species only 150 were commercialized. Agriculture is dominated by only 12 species out of which four yields more than 50 per cent of the total (rice, wheat, maize & potato). In recent times there is a tendency to incorporate the maximum good characters in a single variety. As soon as better variety is developed the same is distributed far and wide and brought in use consequently the local indigenous varieties are discarded and their specific alleles are lost forever.
The genetic erosion is a matter of serious concern as it will hamper the crop improvement programme. The traditional varieties of crops and their wild relatives possess several useful genes, which may be exploited for the improvement of crop varieties through crop breeding. Thus the maintenance of a diversity of crops with different characteristics gives the community a buffer stock of food, if droughts or floods or pest attack occurs.
Genetic erosion is a process where the limited gene pool of an endangered species diminishes even more when reproductive individuals die off before reproducing low population
The organization/ department/ country when introduce an hybrid variety, has got the responsibility to keep the original one. If the hybrid variety fail, the original must be available.
But I don't think, there exists any such rules/ procedure?
Following.
We have been doing crop improvement to increase the quality of crops or genetic enhancement. In applying certain method of crop improvement, we could got many better traits however loss a kind or some traits inevitably.
For this term there are many definitions, but the concept is one: Genetic erosion is a process that limits the genetic pool of an endangered species. For me, the Introduction of hybrid and high-yielding crop/plant varieties is not bad. But in the production fields and market, they should co - exist all forms, i.e. landraces, heirlooms and high-yielding varieties. All of these have utility values for today and the future.
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