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232 | North America and Europe (NAE) Report
Box 6-7. Plant and animal breeding targets to contribute to development and sustainability goals |
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For crops AKST could contribute to the following: For livestock, to improve the efficiency and sustainability of production in terms of food quality and safety, the environment, |
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zoonoses and animal welfare concerns, AKST should contribute to the following: |
• Develop comparative biology including comparative genomics (Sankoff and Nadeau, 2000) to ensure the dissemination of knowledge on a wide range of food species including under-utilized ones (FAO, 2004b); and • Invest in metagenomics, the potential of which is considerable considering applications in agriculture, land environmental remediation, bioenergy, etc. (NRC, 2007). |
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AKST could also explore the potential of more diversified and heterogeneous variety types namely to better meet environmental concerns: for example, it would be interesting to generate a variety of wheat that has three different leaf and stem architectures but is otherwise isogenic; such variety, planted with its mixed morphotypes, could be better at capturing sunlight and carbon dioxide and better at competing with weeds; also, a variety of wheat or maize having different types of root systems (a superficial one with a large covering area and a deep one more localized) could better benefit during restricted water availability in the different soil depth. In this case, the "uniformity" paradigm for variety registration procedures will have to change to integrate and favor diversity. |
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