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Plant Breeding and Disease Resistance
Concepts tested here
- Risk of genetic uniformity
All Questions
2006 AIPMT-PRE 1 question
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Crop plants grown in monoculture are -Monoculture is the cultivation of a single crop, usually a single variety, over a large area.
All the plants are genetically uniform, so all are equally susceptible to the same pathogen or pest.
The pest also gets an unlimited supply of its food plant in one place, with no barriers of other plants.
So once a pest or disease appears, it multiplies and spreads rapidly through the whole crop; examples are the Irish potato famine and the southern corn leaf blight epidemic.
Monocultures are in fact high yielding, which is why they are grown.
Plants of the same species compete with one another for the same resources, so intraspecific competition is present, and a poor root system is not their characteristic.
So crop plants grown in monoculture are highly prone to pests.