Improving Crops for a Changing World

Plant biotechnology has been fundamental to the development of human civilisation.The domestication of plants helped increase food production, allowing the sustenance of populations in large settlements and they provide most calories in the human diet alongside being used as fodder for farm animals.They are also good sources of both therapeutic drugs and industrial feed stocks, while more recently they have been used to produce pharmaceutical proteins and biofuels.There are nevertheless many areas where plants can be improved through genetic manipulation and there are pressing reasons why this needs to be accomplished.