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Selective breeding practice, benefits and problems

Inheritance, variation and evolution • Variation and evolution

Key concepts

What you'll likely be quizzed about

  • Selective breeding, also known as artificial selection, involves selecting individuals exhibiting desirable variations and breeding them to ensure that offspring inherit these traits.
  • Repeated selection across generations concentrates alleles related to the chosen characteristics, producing distinct breeds or varieties.
  • A limiting factor in selective breeding is the available genetic variation within the breeding population; low variation constrains potential changes in traits and raises the risk of inheriting harmful alleles.

Flashcards

Test your knowledge with interactive flashcards

What is another name for selective breeding?

Click to reveal answer

Artificial selection.

Key notes

Important points to keep in mind

Selective breeding chooses parents with desired traits, concentrating those alleles over generations.

Benefits include higher yield, improved quality, and specific resistances, enhancing productivity but not ensuring long-term resilience.

Inbreeding increases harmful recessive alleles, raising risks of inherited disorders and welfare issues.

A small gene pool reduces adaptive potential, increasing vulnerability to new diseases; monitor effective genetic diversity, not just population size.

Cross-breeding or introducing unrelated stock can reduce inbreeding and preserve variation.

Advanced methods speed up propagation but lower diversity; balance short-term gains against long-term risks.

Selecting for one trait can unintentionally affect other linked traits if not monitored.

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