Importance of genetic transformation in ornamental plant breeding

Most of the economically important ornamental plants are cut flowers, which are produced by vegetative propagation. For many years, new varieties of ornamental plants have been produced by cross-hybridization and mutation breeding techniques, separately or in combination. Similar to mutation breeding, genetic transformation would also be a useful way of making a one-point improvement of a trait in original cultivars bred by cross-hybridization. Mutation breeding can change a dominant trait to a recessive one mostly. In other words, genetic transformation produces an “additive” one-point improvement, whereas mutation breeding produces a “subtractive” one-point improvement. Furthermore, genetic transformation can modify target traits by direct incorporation of related genes. Genetic transformation methods will be used in the near future as standard breeding tools in combination with traditional breeding methods.