The role of biotechnology in perennial grass improvement for temperate pastures

Abstract

Biotechnology has the potential to complement conventional plant breeding activities and facilitate the production of temperate grasses with improved productivity and persistence. It provides new techniques for generation of gene markers which may greatly enhance the capacity for cultivar discrimination and for tracking particular traits in breeding programmes. Through plant tissue culture and genetic transformation, it is possible to introduce genes from a wide variety of sources into elite breeding lines. This review provides a summary of recent advances in the application of these technologies to temperate grasses. The development of genetic transformation technology has, in general, been much slower for monocots than for dicots. However, all the elements required for production of transgenic plants are now coming into place. Regeneration systems are now available for many of the temperate grass species. Transformation systems have been used to produce transgenic plants of tall fescue and cocksfoot, and genes have been isolated that have potential for improving plant performance and persistence. Several opportunities for application of biotechnology are discussed including control of invertebrate pests, virus resistance, improved digestibility, and elimination of toxins.

An assessment of the relative importance of specific traits for the genetic improvement of nutritive value in dairy pasture

“…Although selecting for improved nutritive value is of secondary importance to the improvement of agronomic traits, such as yield, adaptation, persistence, seasonal growth and disease resistance in current Australian pasture breeding programmes (e.g. Cunningham et al, 1994), this may change as existing goals are reached and new developments in measuring pasture quality, such as near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (Smith and Flinn, 1991) and molecular biology (van Heeswijk et al, 1994), allow more rapid improvement of nutritive value.…”