History of plant breeding

• 700 BC – Babylonians and Assyrians pollinated date palm artificially
• 17th century – several varieties of heading lettuce were developed in France
• 1717 – Thomas Fair Child – produced the first artificial hybrid, popularly known as Fair Child’s mule, by using carnation with sweet William
• 1727 – The first plant breeding company was established in France by the vilmorins.
• 1760-1766 – Joseph koelreuter, a German, made extensive crosses in tobacco.
• 1759-1835 – Knight was perhaps the first man to use artificial hybridization to develop several new fruit varieties.
• Le couteur and Shireff used individual plant selections and progeny test to develop some useful cereal varieties
• 1873 – the work of Patrick Shireff was first published.
• He concluded that only the variation heritable nature responded to selections, and that their variation arose through ‘natural sports’ (= mutation) and by ‘natural hybridization’ (= recombination during meiosis in the hybrids so produced).
• 1856 – Vilmorin developed the progeny test and used this method successfully in the improvement of sugar beets.
• 1900 – Nilson-Ehle, his associates developed the individual plant selection method in Sweden.
• 1903 – Johannsen proposed the pure line theory that provided the genetic basis for individual plant selection.
• The science of genetics began with the rediscovery of Gregor Johan Mendel’s paper in 1900 by Hugo de veris, Tshermark and Correns which was originally published in 1866.