In 1996, interdisciplinary scientists ushered in a new age of collaboration between molecular biologists and plant breeders with the introduction of herbicide- and insect-tolerant transgenic plants on a commercial agronomic scale. In the past 6–7 years, herbicide and insect tolerance traits have been utilised in many different agronomic and vegetable crops, and now make up a significant percentage of the acreage planted yearly in the United States for corn, soybeans and cotton. Although there have been no published reports on the production of herbicide- or insect-tolerant ornamental crops, research is currently being conducted on turfgrass, and a select number of significant floriculture crops to engineer glyphosate resistance. The transfer of glyphosate resistance into creeping bentgrass is an obvious example of how proven agronomic traits can be used to make weed control in municipal and highly managed turf environments more efficient. It is very likely that any number of horticultural crops could be engineered with herbicide resistance, but the trait will probably only be commercially viable in crops grown in the field or planted in the ground in large public areas, such as vegetable crops, turfgrass, bedding plants and nursery crops. The use of herbicide resistance as a selectable marker in tissue culture, and subsequently as a ‘stacked’ trait on top of other introduced traits may influence the appearance of this technology in future crops grown for ornamental purposes as well.From a broad perspective, it appears that the future for application of biotechnology to ornamental crops is promising. Many technical advancements have been made that have provided ‘proof of concept’ of their commercial utility in ornamental crops, and this work will likely supply the next generation of flower breeders with many novel traits. As progress is made in sequencing new plant genomes and as functional genomic tools become more widely used in crops of lesser economic value, scientists working to apply biotechnology to ornamental crops will likely find themselves with more novel traits to work on than they have people in their labs. There is no question that the main technical limitations that exist for applying biotechnology to ornamental crops lie mainly in the area of development of transformation systems for the large number of plant species used in the industry. For this reason, it will be imperative for breeders to introgress commercially viable traits into breeding stocks, whether their goal is to reproduce their crops by sexual or asexual means.
The real potential of biotechnology in ornamental crops is probably not going to be determined by any major difficulties encountered in the technical realm—it appears that there will be many genes and promoters that will have commercial viability in the ornamental plant industry. The factors that will determine how the ornamental plant industry accepts and utilises biotechnology will be more influenced by economic and regulatory issues. It is obvious that in terms of regulatory hurdles, ornamental crops have a particular advantage over food crops because they are non-edible. Since consumers do not physically ingest these products, it is likely that much public relations benefit can be gained in terms of consumer perception of genetically engineered crops by providing them an ornamental plant that is extremely novel and desirable. The introduction of new and novel plants has been the basis of progress in the ornamental plant industry since its inception, so it should be no surprise if that happens.
It is also logical to think that since there may be fewer regulatory hurdles for ornamental plants, the cost of introducing a new biotechnological ornamental crop would be reduced. However, the current regulatory restrictions that have been developed around the introduction of genetically engineered food crops will have to be revisited when regulatory packages for new ornamental crops are submitted to federal agencies. While it may be feasible to submit regulatory packages for each individual cultivar of genetically engineered corn or soybean, it will be cost prohibitive for any company to acquire all of the required regulatory data necessary for the hundreds of individual engineered cultivars that could be developed and potentially released by any particular breeding company. Since an individual ornamental crop has much less commercial value than any individual agronomic crop and a much shorter market life expectancy, the costs of gaining regulatory approval from federal agencies will have far more impact on the economic decisions made by those parties interested in engineering these crops. With the current royalty structures and profit margins in the ornamental plant industry, combined with a comparatively low market volume, it would take a company several years to recur the initial cost of their biotechnology investment, even when they capture large percentages of a given market share. In addition, many cut flowers and vegetative propagules used in the ornamental plant industry are produced in Africa, Central and South America and Europe, and are imported into the United States and all throughout Europe and Asia. With the current global status of genetically engineered plants in most of these regions being more restrictive than in the United States, any segment of the industry depending on import or export of products outside the United States will have far more complications in the physical movement of genetically engineered ornamental plants. These types of scenarios ultimately restrict the application of plant biotechnology to ornamental crops far more than any limitations at the technical end.
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