Current Status of Seed Industry and Crop Breeding Strategies

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Crop produce comes from seeds. It is important to have elite seeds for cultivation and harvesting. There are two major types of seeds in the seed market: F1 hybrid seeds and open-pollinated seeds (OP, traditionally pollinated). Farmers in developed countries plant F1 hybrid in most cases, while farmers in developing countries plant mainly OP. In fact, 60-70% of seeds planted in India and China are OP because OP is significantly cheaper. There are several reasons why the seed industry is important. First is for global food security. Based on the fact that the global population continues to increase steadily, additional productivity of 70% will be required to feed the global population by the year 2050. Second, seeds were traditionally used as food, both fresh and feed, but have now become materials for future industries of medicine, pharmaceutics, functional foods, energy, and may other applications. Third, new breeding programs based on biotechnology have changed the seed market dramatically. These programs are highly competitive and indeed play a major role, not only in the reduction of breeding time, the development of various genetic sources, the enhancement of purity and cost-saving, but also for the selection of value-added varieties.
In Korea, F1 breeding began 65 years ago and the breeding programs for several vegetables and rice are in the top class worldwide. In addition, for the first time in 1999, a private seed company in Korea employed biotechnology for the purpose of crop breeding to develop platform technologies that could be utilized in the breeding practice. The major achievement so far is the development of DNA markers associated with resistance to disease, tolerance to the environment, and functional aspects. The application of genotyping has made many services possible, such as the purity control of F1 and inbred lines, variety verification, MAS (marker assisted selection), and MAB (marker assisted backcrossing). In addition, cell fusion and DH technologies have helped breeders to solve breeding limitations. There have been many cases of successful crop transformations, however, no GM varieties have been successfully commercialized in Korea. I bet this is inevitable, though. And it should be, because Korea imports lots of GM products, equivalent to $3 billion every year.
More seed production and higher crop quality require new R&D strategies for breeding practices in the seed industry. Thanks to genomics information with big data and anti-GMO policies, new technologies are on the horizon, including genomic breeding, genome editing, in silico breeding and NBT (new plant breeding technology). I am going to talk more about the direction and strategy of R&D for crop breeding.