Plant hybridization

The mating or crossing of two plants or lines of dissimilar genotype is called hybridization. In plant hybridization, one of the plants is taken as the female plant and the other as the male plant.

Hybridization is an important method of combining characters of different plants. Hybridization does not change genetic contents of organisms but it produces new combination of genes.

What are the objectives of hybridization?
*To combine all the good characters into a single variety.
*To produce useful variations by introducing recombination of characters.
*To produce and utilize hybrid vigor.

There are two main categories of hybridization techniques; sexual and somatic. Sexual hybridization, commonly known as wide or distant hybridization produces hybrid combinations within specific taxonomic distances.

Sexual hybridization techniques have been used over time to produce better as well as new crops such as triticale, which is a crop species produced from the sexual cross between wheat (Triticum vulgar) and rye (Secale cereale) in 1875.

Somatic hybridization is the particle collider of the biological world: where plant cells stripped of their cell wall are fused to create interspecific crosses containing a huge range of genetic information. This technique unlike sexual hybridization is done in vitro and requires specific handling of the materials to be fused.
Plant hybridization